Life After Life (2 page)

Now Lois Flowers’s daughter, Kathryn, comes rushing into the room, a look of relief to find her mother still there. She is wearing her name tag from Bank of America where she is a teller. She nods at Joanna, no need for words. Joanna has already told her there isn’t much time. Lois Flowers has not opened her eyes in eighteen hours, but her breathing does change when Kathryn’s cheek is pressed against hers. “She’s listening,” Joanna says. “She knows you’re here.”

Before Lois stopped talking, she always asked Kathryn how school was and did she have homework. Joanna offers her seat and goes to stand by the window. It is important to be present and also allow people space and privacy. Outside the sun is shining and the roses are in full bloom. Mr. Stanley Stone and his son, Ned, are sitting on a bench talking. They were the first family Joanna worked with when she moved back. Mrs. Stone was dying and everyone in the family remained separate and distant. They lived up to the family name, though these days, the son, Ned, always says hello and acts like he wants to say more to her. Ned was several years ahead of her in school and then went to military school so she never really knew him. She’s heard all the sad stories people think of when they see him, though, and now add his father’s dementia on top of everything else. Mr. Stone walks the halls of Pine Haven, often insulting those who make eye contact. Now Ned Stone is leaning forward, his head in his hands while his dad stands in front of him shaking his fist.

“Mama? Mama, it’s me,” Kathryn says. “It’s Kathryn.”

Kathryn strokes the hair back from her mother’s face and leans in close. She tells her mother how much she loves her and what a good mother she has been. She tells her about a new pair of shoes she just bought and how she got them for half price and what a beautiful June day it is. “Clang, clang, clang went the trolley,” she sings, and then stops, closes her eyes, and presses her cheek against her mother’s. She sits smoothing her mother’s hair, shaking her head in disbelief that she is
here
in this moment.
How can it be?
her expression seems to ask. It’s an ordinary Friday morning and Joanna cannot help but imagine what it would have been like if she had had the chance to be with her own mother, to lean in close and whisper good-bye, and in that moment there is a change in the air, and in that moment, they all come back to her, all the last days and last words and last breaths. Kathryn whispers the words,
What’ll I do—when—you . . .
and then it is time; without a word, everything changes and they know that it is time.

Notes about:
Lois Elizabeth Malcolm Flowers

Born:
July 14, 1929
Died:
Friday, June 7, 2010, at approximately 10:35 a.m. Pine Haven Retirement Facility Fulton, North Carolina

It was a warm sunny day, drapes fully opened to let all the light in, just as Lois Flowers always requested. The room was comfortable; somehow in spite of all the stark nursing apparatus, the room was as warm and welcoming as Lois herself. On the very first day, she invited me in and told me how lovely it was to have me there.
Not the ideal situation,
she said,
but still lovely to see you.
She said she had not known my parents well but sure did like those hot dogs my dad made, especially the Chihuahua because whoever heard of putting hot salsa on a plain old hot dog? Lois Flowers loved music and she loved fashion. She had a subscription to
Vogue
that had never lapsed in over forty years. “You could never get away with outfits like that here in Fulton,” she said. “But it is important to know what folks are wearing elsewhere.” She loved turquoise and the way people complimented her when she wore it. “I’m a winter,” she liked to say, and referred often to a folder labeled “Personal Color Harmony” and all the little color samples within. She never went shopping for clothes or lipstick without it. Her favorite holiday was Halloween because she loved to see children having so much fun, but mainly because she liked a good excuse to wear orange even though her chart said that winters
do not wear orange well.
She decided that even if she looked horrid,
so what? It was Halloween, but,
she said
, I looked quite striking in an orange alpaca sweater and black gabardine slacks. It’s the one time the chart got it wrong.
She still had the orange sweater and insisted that I take it and promise to wear it every October 31. She gave her daughter, Kathryn, the newer Halloween sweater, a honey-colored cashmere with black cat and witch hat buttons.
Kathryn is a true autumn and that sweater is perfect for her,
she said.
You can see why I want everything perfect for her.
She suggested I rethink the way I wear my hair and then put a hand to her mouth and apologized for such a rude remark. “This is all new,” she told me. “This way I say things I don’t mean to say,” and I was able to assure her that I completely understood and that I am reconsidering what to do with my hair. She smiled and blew me a kiss. She said, how about some golden highlights and something layered to give body?

She had matchbooks from every nice restaurant she had ever gone to. Her favorites were Tavern on the Green and Windows on the World. She said she loved eating in New York City. She said her husband teased her that all it took for her to love a restaurant was for it to be in New York City and have lots of windows and a preposition in the name. She told Kathryn she needed to get back there, that they should take a trip and see a show. When told that both restaurants were gone, she held a firm position that she
still
needed to go there. “And so do you!” she said, always pulling me into the conversation. “And if there’s not a young man in your life” (she asked me often if I had met anyone interesting), she said that I should just go alone. “Women do that now,” she said. “A woman can go wherever she wants right by herself.”

Once, while her husband and Kathryn were out at the County Fair, Lois Flowers burned her Maidenform bra in a hibachi in their backyard. When her husband asked
what’s that smell?
she said she had no earthly idea. She said it made her feel connected to something big and important, that she stood there in the backyard and pretended she was at a rally in New York City. She never told him what she had done, even when she saw him studying the ashes and what looked like a scrap of nylon. She had never even told anyone about it until that day; she said,
I have always felt liberated.

Her last words were to Kathryn, spoken two days before she died. “Honey, do you have homework?” She had asked that question hundreds of times over the years and if Kathryn did
not
have homework, the two of them went shopping. Lois Flowers loved her daughter and she loved to shop. Kathryn said that all of their important conversations took place during those little shopping trips. What to expect when you start your period. Why you got that bad grade. Why a sassy mouth is not a good thing. How your reputation is your most prized possession. Why you should always do your best. Why good hygiene is a must. What boys do and do not have good sense about or control over. These topics were often whispered over the lunch counter at Wood’s Dimestore where Kathryn got a cherry Coke or a milkshake and Lois got a cup of black coffee, her red lipstick staining the fat lip of the heavy white mug. Sometimes they ate pie or got a hot dog and always they were flanked with a bag or two of things they had found to buy over at Belk or the Fashion Bar or Smart Shop. “I can’t wait to get home and see what all we got,” Lois would say many times, and Kathryn said that once home, her mother kept the excitement going for many more hours with a fashion show and then talk of all the places Kathryn would go to wear the new things and all the wonderful things that would happen as a result. “Her predictions were not often right,” Kathryn said. “But she was sincere.”

I hugged my orange alpaca sweater close as I waited there with Kathryn. I wanted to tell her how lucky she was to have had such a relationship with her mother, but it was clear that she knew this. She held firmly to her mother’s hand for as long as she was able, and then when the men came to take her mother away, she reached for my hand as we followed them out. I will miss them both very much.

[from Joanna’s notebook]

Lois Flowers

The best table is over by the window, a big glass window and you can see the whole city just like a bird soaring in the sky. White linen and candles and yes, just a little champagne. Knives and forks and ice in crystal and a crystal ash tray, too, the filter smudged with her latest color—Claret, a perfect color, one of her reds. All of the colors on the chart (every chip!) may be taken a little darker or a little lighter. You can match clothing, makeup, accessories, and interior decor to colors on your chart. Don’t ever remove the tags until you check your purchase in natural daylight as well as artificial light. Daylight. She can feel the daylight, and even this high up and behind all that glass she can hear the birds and some music. There is lovely music and a bathroom attendant, too, they shake hands and brush cheeks, what’ll I do when you, oh thank you ever so much, thank you for your assistance. A plaid should always have at least two of your colors. The second eye color catches the glints, streaks, and flecks in your eyes. Her daughter has green flecks like her father; she is an autumn. Beautiful rusts and greens and golds and new shoes and homework. Do you have homework, honey? Daylight and Chanel No. 5, cheek to cheek, so lovely, too, and there is music and there are lots of little goodies over there on a big silver tray, over there by the big window, all shapes and sizes of beautiful and delicious canapés and the light fixtures are exquisite and there’s music, always there is music, and colors and colors and beautiful colors. Just the right colors for a busy woman on the go, high heels click click click on that polished marble floor, and if she stands perfectly still, she can feel the building sway, the whole city below her is so bright and beautiful it leaves her light-headed and she feels the building sway, back and forth like a song, like a slow and easy swaying song.

C.J.

(Carolina Jessamine)

S
PEAKING OF THINGS NEVER
to tell your kids: How about where you were fucking at the time of conception? How about
that
? Or how about what everything costs? It costs this to feed you and that to clothe you. I wish I could send you to summer camp, but it costs too much and so does a bike and so does a house that looks worth a shit. Even the best intentions (the shitty day camp through the recreation department and the jeans that are the copy of what everybody else is wearing) still leaves you feeling like an undesirable—an unwanted thing to be put in the next room while all the Mr. Wrongs come and go, like anybody even believes there is a Mr. Right. Her mom once had a date with a Mr. Wright and what a joke that was. Yeah, whatever. Fuck your brains out. She didn’t say it but that’s what she was thinking.

Her name is Carolina Jessamine, named for a native vine—close kin to Confederate jasmine, both hardy thriving plants that will take over a structure in no time at all. You want to hide something ugly, just plant jasmine and then watch the ugly thing disappear. Her name is beautiful or so people say but maybe they wouldn’t say that or think it if they knew how she got it—one of those things she shouldn’t know, but her mother was too stupid or too unaware or something to know better. Her mother was fucking in the arboretum, right over there where C.J. goes out to smoke every day on her break. Her mother is buried just beyond the very spot—talk about never going anywhere, talk about a really small and limited life. Her mother told her that the whole time she was making love in the arboretum, she was staring up at that beautiful lush vine and the little silver tag that named it: Carolina Jessamine.

Wow, thanks, Mom. If her father—unknown creature that he is—had only flipped her over and fucked her from behind, C.J. might be named Splitbeard Bluestem or Hairgrass or Common Phlox. Talk about too much information. And did her mother even tell her about the plants beyond that? The purpose the splitbeard bluestem serves to control erosion, the silvery seed heads bursting to hold on and take root and never leave or the brackish-loving hairgrass on underground runners, popping up unexpectedly like a bad nosy neighbor. It made her think of what it must look like down below, the moles and voles tunneling along; it made her think of learning all about the Underground Railroad, people escaping, disappearing, resurfacing into a whole new place and life. It makes her inhale a long deep breath just to even imagine it. Now the crossvine is in bloom, orange and red trumpets straining for sunlight. She takes one of those good cleansing breaths Toby talks about when they try to get people to do yoga and it is peaceful, a whole roomful of old folks breathing deeply and chanting—one sounding like a sewing machine and another a squirrel.