by Kris Radish
Katherine closes her eyes while Jill positions herself and asks her to please hang on, and in that dark spot, just behind her eyelids, Katherine seeks something sacred and true. She finds a memory that resurrects itself with just the simple closing of her eyes.
This is that moment. This one moment just weeks before her mother’s death. Katherine was sitting in her mother’s room at the hospice center. There had been hours of silence as Katherine monitored the twitches in her mother’s face, the graceful way her mother’s hands remained folded on top of her chest, the fine lines that moved from the corner of her mother’s eyes to reach for her silver hairline, the way her mother turned to greet every single person who came into the room no matter how much pain she was experiencing, the way—even when the drugs had grabbed hold of her—that she tried to rise off her pillow to make certain that Katherine was still in the room with her, standing guard, protecting, making certain—as she always did—that everything was taken care of and that everyone was moving in the proper direction.
Katherine moved her chair to the side of her mother’s bed and as soon as she did so, her mother felt her there and raised her hand so that their fingers were touching and then something moved inside of Katherine that she had never felt before. A startled cry came from her throat and she rose to her feet so abruptly she pushed the chair over when she stood up. Katherine, without thinking, turned down the covers to her mother’s hospital bed, slipped off her shoes, and climbed into bed with her mother.
Her mother stirred for a second and then moved into Katherine’s arms—her daughter’s arms—as if she were a baby. Katherine held her with such fierceness she wondered for a moment if she might be hurting her mother, her dying, terribly ill mother, and then whatever was passing through her exploded in a shock wave of grief, in the acknowledgment of the finality, in a burst of knowledge that made her moan and cry like she had never cried before in her entire life.
“Oh Mommy,” she moaned. “Oh Mommy I love you so much.”
Somehow her mother found the side of Katherine’s face and she moved her fingers in small circles on the skin of her cheek and then she slid her fingers into her hair. Katherine could feel her mother’s labored breathing in her ear, she could feel her heart beating against her own heart and she felt a surge of love so fierce she almost willed herself to die with her mother—almost.
Katherine’s mind then moved throughout all of the cycles of her life, back to her earliest memories, and into only the fine and wonderful things that she could remember about her mother. She remembered the soft feel of clean sheets against her legs every Friday night and the smell of freshly baked cookies on Saturday mornings. She remembered how her mother packed her lunch and often left notes in the folds of her sandwich wrapping. She remembers how she once viewed her mother as weird and different because she never worked and how her mother held her gently but firmly against the wall one afternoon and said, “Don’t you ever, ever, the rest of your life make fun of someone else’s choices.” She remembers her first period and how her mother took her to dinner to celebrate and brought her a silver bracelet that she still wears to “honor all the female parts of her life and the glory of being a woman.” She remembers moments like all of these as if she were on fire and through her sobs and her mother’s tormented breathing she thinks she will explode with the seemingly endless positions of grief.
Katherine remembers her mother backing off when she was growing up and needed to be alone and then slipping a note under her bedroom door the afternoon her first boyfriend dumped her. She remembers how her mother always waited up and would kiss her without thinking twice in front of friends, in department stores, in the middle of a conversation at a family party. She remembers the day she married and how she found her mother crying softly in the bathroom and how she went to her and said, “Thank you for always being there, Mom.” And how her mother told her that she was the most wonderful daughter a mother could ever hope to have.
When her mother stirs and then moans out loud, Katherine still remembers. She remembers giving birth to her own daughter and how her mother stood at the window in the hospital and told her, “Now you know,” without ever saying a word. She remembers how just after the baby was born her mother would simply show up on the bad days without a call—and how on those days they would enjoy a small glass of wine with lunch and then maybe another glass in the middle of the afternoon and how Katherine thought she was losing her mind because she had no idea what she was doing, how to raise a baby, how to some days even rise off her own bed. She remembers how her mother walked through the reception line after she received her law degree and leaned to say, “I never ever doubted you for one moment since the day you were born.”
She remembers the day her mother came to her to tell her that she was dying. The way, even then, her mother was there so she could lean against her and how then suddenly, everything changed in the next sentence.
“I need you now,” her mother told her. “I need you like I have never needed anyone, and you have to help me. Be who you are now, baby, be who I taught you to be. This is not going to be easy and I am going to have to lean into you.”
And she did. Katherine remembers that the leaning began immediately and she remembers every second of the doctor visits and then the day her mother could not eat and the day her mother could not walk and the day her mother could no longer talk and they brought her to the hospice, and then she knows that she will remember these last moments with her mother every single day for the rest of her own life.
“Katherine . . .” her mother choked into her ear, just the word “Katherine . . .” and it is enough, it will be enough to get her through the next day and the day after that and the day her mother died and the funeral and the months and days after that and then this—this remembering as Jill finds her own safe place on the porch floor.
Always remembering.
They talk then, Jill and Katherine, about the traveling funeral and just a bit about loss and making plans and how bizarre it will be to finally meet each other in person and how they hope they can find their way and Annie’s way and how they hope everyone else can go, and then when Jill is settled, it’s time to make the next call.
Jill reassures Katherine that she will be fine, eventually she has to be fine, that something inside of her has slipped loose and that perhaps the traveling funeral will help her move the knots of her life a bit tighter—or not.
“Maybe not,” Jill says, pushing the blanket around her own face. “Maybe that is not what will happen at all.”
Katherine knows what she means. She knows that women who have climbed through a large chunk of their lives are always wise enough to realize that certainty equals uncertainty.
“You know what they say,” she says, looking into the edges of the night that have come to rest outside her own porch.
“What’s that, Katherine the great attorney who saved Annie Freeman all those years ago? What do they say?”
Before she answers, Katherine bends down to pick up her bra. She throws it over her shoulder and then hangs on to the end with her left hand like a baby would hold on to a blankie that was tattered and had been dragged through grocery stores, libraries, Grandma’s house and thirteen neighborhood backyards.
“They say funerals are for the living.”
The calls to the three other women continue at odd intervals because of time zones and Katherine’s need to rush out at the crack of dawn for fresh coffee and then her realization that she has to quickly call in sick, which she has done only twice in the past two years, and have her clerk reschedule everything on her calendar that day. Maybe more—but first just this one day. And maybe the world will fall apart because Katherine Givins missed a day of work, was late, turned left instead of right. But Katherine manages to make the calls anyway.
What is remarkable, beyond the fact that she does every single thing without her Bali bra, is that there is no hesitation. None. Just delicious movements of precision because there r
eally isn’t that much to do—Annie has done almost everything as Annie has always wanted to do and she surely wants to do this more than anything she can remember or imagine. It is as if there is no choice. As if someone or something else has decided and Katherine is just filling the order like the fine waitress she was back in college when she worked until two A.M. and dreamed of calling her clerk—this moment—and saying, “I won’t be in.”
“I won’t be in.”
5
Jill and Annie
Sonoma, California, 1978
* * *
Jill Matchney hears the new assistant professor coming before she sees her. Boots clicking against the tile floors in the long hallway outside her office door. Hesitation. The sound of someone breathing quickly—deep breaths from that spot just below a breastbone. A longer pause. She must be looking out the windows, thinking about what to say, what it will be like, what this next step into this next part of her world will be like.
“Perhaps the protégé I have been waiting for all these years,” Professor Jill Jacobs Matchney says to herself while she waits for the required knock. “Perhaps.”
Hand selected, recruited, interviewed ad nauseam, Annie G. Freeman was the number one choice of every single member of the interviewing committee, and she was offered a salary and a position higher than anyone her age, anyone with her years of experience and surely anyone with her saucy attitude—which is precisely why Professor Matchney wanted her.
“If we want to move forward, if we want to attract the dollars and the attention that a university needs to bring in the top students, leaders, community support and faculty members, then we need a dozen Annie G. Freemans,” she declared, standing with her hands on the oak table in the chancellor’s office and her mind stretching to the future. “This woman has drive, talent, charisma and fabulous academic credentials.”
Professor Matchney got her Annie Freeman and now—now—would be the true test. Could Annie Freeman carry it off?
“Lock the door,” Matchney told Freeman that very first day, “and please come into my private office.”
Professor Matchney had dismissed her assistant early and had notified the switchboard to hold her calls. She had canceled her evening appointment with her friends at the bookstore and she was willing to stay as long as it took.
Assistant Professor Annie G. Freeman moved past her mentor quickly and then stopped suddenly, which surprised Professor Matchney. The two women faced each other, close enough to kiss, and Annie G. Freeman put her hand on the professor’s arm, in that long stretch below the shoulder and before the elbow, and she grabbed her firm and long.
“Thank you for hiring me,” Annie Freeman said with such directness that the professor was startled and lost that place in her mind, her bookmark, that would have allowed her to see the next page, the next thought, the next word that she must utter clearly.
“Thank you?”
“Oh, yes!”
Jill Matchney cannot speak. She already knows she has made the proper decision. This close to Annie Freeman, she sees a spark the size of a boulder simmering behind the younger woman’s eyes.
“I wanted to work with you,” Annie Freeman tells her. “You are the reason I am here.”
“Just me?”
“I didn’t apply anywhere else. I have read everything you have ever written. I’ve interviewed your students, talked to former professors, examined every thesis and document produced by the department in the past three years, and I’ve made myself physically ill worrying about this meeting, this first day, my professional introduction.”
Professor Matchney smiles. She wants to laugh out loud but she imagines her new protégé would be frightened, even with her obvious bold spirit, by a laugh just now. She can feel a tremble right where the assistant professor’s fingers touch the edge of her shirt and nudge into her skin. “I’m flattered.”
“Thank you.”
“Please, then, sit down. We have much to discuss.”
“Wait, please.”
The professor has turned away but when she hears the request, she turns back to face the assistant professor. “What is it? Are you all right?”
“I need to ask you something. It may seem ridiculous but I have to ask it. The question and several following it—well, I just have to ask them.”
Jill Matchney is now perplexed. She cannot imagine what this bright, wise, attractive, challenging young professor could be worried about. She cannot imagine what is keeping her from moving from the spot on the floor of her office where her own feet have become frozen. She cannot wait to hear the question.
“Of course,” she responds. “Of course.”
Annie G. Freeman drops her hands. She grabs them, one holding the other as if she were holding something delicate that still needed to breathe.
“Will you help me?” she asks.
“Help you?” Jill Matchney responds so quickly she barely realizes she has spoken.
“Yes, help me. It may sound foolish but I want you to help me. I do not want to be challenged irresponsibly like I have been at other universities by self-righteous, pompous senior professors. I do not want to be tricked. I don’t want to have to stand on my head to get promoted or to get stuck teaching only the night classes. I want to be mentored and trained and I’d like to stay here forever.”
The negotiations continued for hours. There was no begging or pleading, only an honest and raw discussion between teacher and student, mentor and trainee, soon-to-be comrades, focused talents.
In the end Professor Jill Matchney agreed to help Assistant Professor Annie G. Freeman, and the agreement, an unwritten set of directions, an intersecting diagram that covered parallel and yet totally distinct ways of life, became a shared heartbeat, an enlarged passion, and a bond between two women that lasted until the very day one of them died and then beyond that moment, even beyond that moment.
6
* * *
Laura has had one of those feelings all day. It’s that “looking over your shoulder because you think someone is watching you” kind of feeling. It’s that “something’s going to happen” kind of feeling that has her remembering what she looked like in the morning and how she felt after lunch and the face of the man at the last corner before the post office, because one of those things, maybe two or three or fourteen of those damn things, will be a significant reminder for whatever is winging its way toward her on this particular day when her hands and mind and every single thing about her will not, could not, cannot stay still.
When she was young, Laura knew things. She knew the exact time—almost—her father would arrive at home each evening, and she would always be there, sitting on the steps—even in the dead of winter—to greet him. She even knew his ever-changing seemingly startled response: “There’s my baby” or “Look, someone left a package on the doorstep,” or “Wow, someone is shooting a commercial and there’s a model on the doorstep” or mostly just, “Hi, baby doll.”
Not just that for all these years, but other things too. Important things. Knowing when to stop just before an accident occurred at the bridge. Staying home and then the call comes. Turning left to see that sunset—waves of light, brilliant colors that make people stop and rush into Kmart to purchase a camera. Touching the woman in line at Albertson’s who came to the grocery store wearing her loneliness like a new hat just so someone would do that—simply touch her. Closing her eyes and seeing people she has never met, does not know except for the certain feeling that they exist. Seeing their faces, the color of their hair, the way they walk their dogs, how they forage for food, the way they tilt their heads slightly to the left just before a kiss—in places so distant they are barely dots on the international maps she keeps in her small bedroom office.
“Crap,” Laura says to no one in particular at 8:29 P.M. when she steps into her dark kitchen and hears the phone ringing.
Laura has to answer it. It doesn’t matter what the caller ID says. The ID could be wrong. It may not be Wells
Fargo but instead some voice from the past that connects her to a lost fortune of feelings. It could be a wrong number that turns into a conversation that is as enlightening as anything she has ever experienced. It could be her wayward and often missing prodigal daughter Erin reporting in from Belize or Kentucky or Tokyo or wherever in the hell she has landed this particular week. It is most likely not her husband or the neighbor who is tending to her dying father. But it could be anyone else. Absolutely anyone. Laura has this feeling, this twinge in the center of her quivering stomach, that tells her in a warm rumble that moves there to the center of her mind to the edge of the hand that she must pick up the phone, that to not answer the phone would be beyond a mistake.
It is a woman’s voice. One that she has heard at only a distance as an echo behind another voice. One that has paced through her mind constantly for the past three days so that Laura was certain she was about to see or meet or in some way encounter the very woman who owned the voice. One that she would not recognize until she hears the voice say the name “Katherine Givins” and Laura can then recall a long-ago conversation, the mention of this name many times, and that echo of sound.
“It’s Katherine Givins,” the woman says, then hesitates, and Laura Westma, forty-nine years old, who lives in a tiny bungalow in a suburb just barely north of downtown Chicago with her husband, a cat and all of her wandering and often missing daughter’s possessions, sits down abruptly because she is suddenly lost in a swirl of memories, vivid, wide, and so consuming that they make her lose her balance. Laura who has hair cropped so close to her head she is often mistaken for a short man who likes to wear pressed jeans and turtlenecks well into summer and who refuses to wear makeup and who walks with such determination people who don’t know her think she is perpetually angry. Laura with her eighty-hour workweeks as the director of the women’s center and her fund-raisers and the very old and increasingly heavy weight of the knowledge that there is never going to be enough time, enough money, enough anything to save everyone, including herself and especially her daughter.
