Kinship of Clover

by Ellen Meeropol

  The butter sizzled in the pan—it smelled so good—and Flo dumped the veggies in to sauté. Charlie lifted his head, sniffed the cooking aroma, then went back to sleep. Maybe it was better to go out in a blaze of youthful energy instead of this incremental wilting of nerve cells, crumbling of synapses, spots of mold eating up her memories. She caught her reflection in the kitchen window, framed by the curtains she hung when Sam was a little boy and worried about people looking in at them. The curtains were more gray than yellow and the hemming was coming undone. She’d take care of that tomorrow, wash them and mend them and they’d be good as new.

  The phone rang and Flo hurried into the living room to answer it. Sam nagged her about trading in the landline for one of those smart phones, but at least with this one she always knew where it was and couldn’t lose it. Besides, she didn’t feel very smart, not any more.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Mimi. Are you okay?”

  Flo smiled. “Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Your message sounded—I don’t know—frantic maybe? Desperate.”

  “Message?”

  Mimi didn’t answer for a few seconds. “Didn’t you just leave me a message, to call you?”

  Flo tried to think, but all that came were images of cooking with honey and Mimi sharing a bottle of red wine with Marlene. “Hmmm,” she said. “What are you up to tonight?”

  “Watching an old movie on TV. What about you?”

  She and Charlie used to love the movies. Their first date was a Godard film, Breathless, in a small cinema near Dupont Circle. July of 1960, a few weeks after they met on the picket line at Glen Echo, two young people fired up and determined to integrate the amusement park. Charlie and his friends from Howard University sat in on the carousel and were arrested. Flo had just graduated high school and lived in the neighborhood. That park had defined her childhood summers—riding the ostrich on the carousel and swimming in the magical Crystal Pool—so of course she had to be part of the protests. Her parents forbade her to go, but she went anyway, carrying a hand-lettered picket sign. Bumper cars for all, or something silly like that. “I like your sign,” Charlie had said, falling into line next to her.

  “Flo?” Mimi’s voice replaced the image of Charlie’s face, shiny in the summer heat. “You there?”

  “Where else would I be?” Flo said.

  “I don’t know,” Mimi said. “But sometimes these days you’re … missing.”

  Mimi had always been direct. It was one of the things Flo loved about her friend, except when the directness veered across the line into bossiness. Mimi liked to make pronouncements about things, and once pronounced, she rarely changed her mind. Not too good with the gray areas. That was probably why Flo had never told her about Charlie.

  Charlie was all hers, her secret. It might be the most important part of her, what defined her, along with Sam and her women friends. When she met Charlie, she was already involved in civil rights with a city-wide group of high school students. They called themselves SAD, Students Against Discrimination. An unfortunate name, she later realized, but SAD and the Glen Echo movement and Charlie introduced her to the grown-up politics that changed her forever. That connected her, intensely and viscerally, to something big and world-changing. She studied Marx and his framework, his sharp focus, helped her make sense of it all. Sure, the Party made mistakes, but no one else had come up with a better way to understand and try to change the world.

  It wasn’t just the politics. Charlie opened her ears to new music too. That summer, while her neighborhood friends were swooning to Cathy’s Clown and Teen Angel, Charlie introduced her to the exciting sound coming out of Detroit. Motown, he called it, with groups like The Miracles and the Marvelettes. They danced to “Shop Around” and “Please Mr. Postman” in the living room of his apartment near the university when his roommates were out.

  “Like now.” Mimi’s voice was insistent. “Are you still with me, Flo?”

  Maybe it was selfish, but she never told Mimi about any of it. Not about that first summer, and how she didn’t want to go to college in September, but Charlie wouldn’t let her stay. Not about trying to find him when she came home for winter break and he had moved. Not about going to Glen Echo every Saturday when she was home the next summer, when the park was finally integrated, and riding the carousel and the bumper cars but Charlie never showed up. And certainly not about what came later.

  “I’m really worried about you,” Mimi said. “How your attention wanders. Your memory loss is getting worse, isn’t it?”

  Her memory wasn’t disappearing, just recalibrating. She might not remember calling Mimi but she remembered the swirly pattern of the gilded spirals painted on the winged horse Charlie rode on the carousel the day he was arrested. She remembered the old things, the most important things, the people she had loved. The struggles she cared about.

  “I remember a lot,” Flo said.

  “You are my best friend in the world and I love you.” Mimi’s voice trembled. “And this is very hard for me to say. But I think Sam is right. I think Assisted Living would be a safer place for you to live.”

  So there it was, bossy Mimi in full display. Flo placed the receiver carefully in the phone cradle. Maybe bossy Mimi wouldn’t even notice and would keep talking to an empty phone line. Flo didn’t want to hear about Assisted Living. She wanted to remember.

  Charlie broke her heart when he disappeared like that, leaving no way to contact him. She called the registrar at his university several times, but they didn’t believe she was his sister and refused to give out any information. She haunted his old neighborhood, sat on the steps of the house he no longer rented, harassed the one friend of his she had met. Eventually, she stopped looking. She told herself it was humiliating and she tried to care about her dignity. She went back to college and her life there was full enough and she spent summers doing political work. A few years later when she volunteered for Freedom Summer, she thought maybe she’d run into him in Mississippi, but no such luck. No Charlie.

  The phone rang again, but Flo ignored it. She didn’t need Mimi lecturing her. And she didn’t want to interrupt these memories, even if she couldn’t quite remember when they happened. 1969 or ’70, she thought. She coughed. If only she had a lozenge handy for this scratchy throat.

  Of all the places she’d dreamed of finding Charlie, she never expected it to be at work. It was a sunny May afternoon and she was considering leaving early. He walked into the community radio station and right up to her desk.

  “Are you the person to talk to about getting coverage of an event?” he asked.

  She had stared at his face. The face that required two shaves a day or it was sandpaper on her skin and she never cared except that it made her mother suspicious that maybe she wasn’t actually staying over at Susan’s house so often.

  “Charlie?” she whispered. “Is that really you?”

  He didn’t answer, but his eyes glistened. That evening, over dinner and drinks at her apartment and talk that lasted on and off until morning, they caught up with each other’s lives. Her college and journalism school and work for public radio until they fired her for being argumentative and having a political agenda, how she loved working for a community media cooperative. His return home to Detroit to organize autoworkers, his marriage and two young sons.

  “Why did you disappear like that?” she finally asked him.

  He answered into the thicket of her hair. “Because Jim Crow was alive and well in D.C. in 1960. You would’ve gotten us both killed.”

  Ten years had thickened her waistline a little but also taught her a lot about what her body needed and this time she wasn’t afraid to let him know. She remembered every detail about that night: the sparking of skin cells ordinarily tasked with simple barrier duties, holding insides in, keeping microbes out, separating her from other organisms. That night her skin committed dereliction of duty. It opened up and welcomed foreign proteins. Her bones melted and dissolved. H
er muscles relaxed and sang.

  Flo wrapped both arms around her chest and swayed back and forth to the lament of Smokey Robinson seconding that emotion. She remembered how the scratchiness of his beard left red marks that lasted for days. When he slipped away from her apartment just before dawn, she knew he wouldn’t be back.

  She didn’t cry until five weeks later when the clinic nurse called with the results. And then she couldn’t stop. Between bone-shaking bouts of weeping, she argued with herself for three days. Then she called Brad, her on-again, off-again boyfriend, who had just accepted a job in Massachusetts. She let him think the baby was his, without actually saying so. He was delighted at the pregnancy. She gave notice at the radio station and they moved to Springfield. She started freelancing to work from home, met Mimi and they started a women’s group. Brad was a solid man, a good socialist and a good father. Not his fault he wasn’t Charlie.

  She coughed and blinked away the tears. Took a tissue from the box next to the phone and blew her nose. Soppy old woman.

  Okay, so maybe she should have shared the story with Brad, with Mimi. Or even with Sam. Maybe it was cowardly. But she couldn’t share Charlie.

  She coughed again and blinked her eyes several times to try to clear her hazy vision. Was she getting a cold? And why were clouds filling up her living room? No, not clouds.

  Smoke.

  There was knocking. Hammering. On the apartment door? Was someone out there? Who would be visiting? She stood up to answer but the smoke made her cough so hard she had to sit down again. More knocking.

  And a screaming sound. Was that her? Why was she screaming?

  A few blocks away, Sam couldn’t take his eyes off Zoe and Jeremy dancing. He told himself he should return to the adults in the kitchen. He could report that Tim was manning the refreshment table, that Gabe was slow-dancing with two girls at once, and all was well. Instead he meandered over to Zoe’s wheelchair, abandoned and pushed back against the wall. He rested his hand on the crinkly vinyl seat back and watched Zoe swaying on Jeremy’s feet, the way she used to dance with him, her papa, when she was a little girl.

  Sam closed his eyes. The music was slow and dreamy and the melody was familiar, a remake of a song he and Anna once danced to, in the same sweet musical embrace, in the early days before Zoe. For a moment, he was back in college with Anna, at a party in someone’s living room. The furniture was pushed to the walls and they moved through the fog of smoke, fragrant weed and cigarettes mixing in lazy, hazy clouds. Anna’s hair was long then and the furrow between her eyes hadn’t yet formed and they danced closer than skin. He knew within weeks that she was the forever one, and for once his mother didn’t offer an argument.

  Sam and his mother were both wrong about Anna and forever, but after an admittedly unimpressive beginning, Sam became a pretty good dad. His half of the two-family house was always open to his girl. He never cancelled their weekends together, was always available last minute when Anna had to work late or attend weekend meetings. He shared the hospital vigil when Zoe had shunt surgery and he learned to do Zoe’s stretching exercises and her caths, until she became independent with both. At ten years old, when she decided to give up her crutches in favor of the wheelchair, he didn’t argue because she was right, she could move faster and expend less energy in a chair. At twelve, he welcomed her decision to share the upstairs apartment—an ironic echo of his move eleven years earlier—and adapted good-naturedly to the takeover by her clothes and books and music.

  But this guy and his hormones all moony and horny over his girl? Sam wasn’t ready for this and neither was Zoe. She was too young, too vulnerable. He recognized the way Jeremy’s body was bent over, to maximize his contact with Zoe’s chest and arms and conceal his erection. He knew that move. He remembered high school dances, yearning for the slow numbers and dreading them. But that was different; Zoe was his little girl.

  In his wistful state, he confused the first vibration in the front pocket of his jeans with his worry about Zoe and a young man’s hormones. The second time he realized it was his phone, but he didn’t recognize the number on the screen.

  He stepped into the hallway. “Hello?”

  “Sam Tobin?”

  “Speaking. Who’re you?”

  “Springfield Fire Department.”

  Arms in a green jacket enveloped her on the narrow ambulance stretcher.

  “You could have been killed,” the man in green said. “Burned to a crisp.”

  Flo couldn’t respond. Couldn’t answer him because the cloud of smoke was all around her, in her eyes and mouth and nose and clogging the plastic thing over her face and all over her clothes and in her hair and inside her thinking. She must have been sobbing because the man was patting her shoulder and saying, “It’s okay, Ma. Don’t cry.” It was hard to see with the smoky fog and flashing lights, red ones and yellow, fire trucks and ambulances and cop cars and for a moment she thought the man might be Charlie. But no, the man’s face was close to hers and it was closer in hue to hers than Charlie’s and the voice was Sam’s, saying Ma, and they were his arms, his green jacket. When Sam was a baby, the white privilege of her skin bothered her, to have her color weigh more than his father’s. Later, she was grateful, because Sam could pass as an easy-tanning boy, or a throwback to her eastern European relatives. Then the man said something about tea and offered a cup and she knew for sure it was Sam because Charlie hated tea, said it tasted like fishy dishwater. She inhaled the aroma of it, a deep breath, and that made her cough and cough but then she was glad because it pushed some of the smoke away. Sam held the tea close to her face and the steam was cleaner than smoke and what a good boy he was.

  “We’ll get you home, Ma. Home to my place, and out of those smoky clothes, okay?”

  She pushed the mask off her face and pulled a plastic clamp from her finger but Sam put them back.

  “The EMT said you can go home soon. Apparently if your eyelashes and nose hairs aren’t singed, your airway is most likely fine too. But until she returns you need the oxygen, and that thing on your finger. Okay?” His voice broke. “You were very lucky.”

  She wanted to comfort him but her arms were too heavy and the world was still too smoky smudged.

  “If your neighbor hadn’t smelled the smoke and called 911 and kicked in your door, well, I don’t want to think about it.” He paused. “The EMT said I’ve got to keep an eye on your breathing tonight. I’ll make up the sofa bed in my office.”

  But what about her apartment? What about her cat? She looked down at her clothes, rumpled and sooty and where was her pocketbook and her pills and what about all her books and her photo albums and her favorite jacket Anna made from pieces of Sam’s outgrown blue jeans that Flo had saved for years and lined with red satin, and how badly was her apartment burned anyway? Sam wiped her face with something soft, a tissue, and left his hand there. She was too tired to drink the tea even though it smelled so good. She rubbed her cheek against Sam’s hand and closed her eyes. But then the smoke was thicker and she couldn’t breathe for coughing and then she was sobbing hard and grabbing at Sam’s face.

  “What is it, Ma?”

  She couldn’t remember, but there was something important to ask him. About the smoke and the fire and her things. She didn’t have much but they were hers. Her photographs and scrapbooks, even though the corners were chewed up by sharp cat teeth. That was it and she cried harder.

  “Does something hurt? Should I get the EMT?”

  “Charlie? Is he okay?”

  “Your cat?”

  The cat Charlie? The man? She wasn’t sure. Yes, the cat. She grabbed his hand and nodded.

  Sam shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The music in Zoe’s brain was exuberant and insistent and way louder than the crank and racket of the wheelchair lift. Jeremy had promised to come upstairs after he helped clean up from the party. “Half an hour tops,” he said. Holding tight to the image of their dancin
g, she wondered if they had any good snacks she could put out and maybe some soda—and wondered what they would talk about. She wheeled into the living room to find her dad dozing in the recliner and her grandmother asleep on the sofa.

  No! That would ruin everything and the living room smelled bad—murky and nasty and thick.

  Sam’s eyes opened at the sound of her wheels on the wood floor. “Shhhh,” he said. “She needs to sleep.”

  “What happened? What’s that smell?”

  “A fire in her apartment,” Sam whispered.

  Zoe’s eyes filled. “How bad?”

  “Bad. Luckily a neighbor heard her smoke alarm and called the fire department. He said Flo was just sitting in the living room surrounded by smoke. She could have died.” Sam stood up and motioned for Zoe to follow him to the kitchen. “She can’t go back there, can’t live alone any more.” He sat at the table and slumped over into his hands.

  “She could stay here with us,” Zoe said, and then she thought about her two afternoons a week helping Flo. She pictured mornings, when she and her dad by mutual agreement didn’t speak during breakfast, their matching noses buried in books at the kitchen table. She pictured every day after school and every evening. Every single dinnertime, watching her grandmother eat bloody hamburger while claiming she was a vegetarian and drawing with ketchup on the table. It wouldn’t be easy, but when she had to, she could escape to her bedroom to do homework. What a selfish person she was for even thinking like that. She looked up at her dad. “Couldn’t she?”

  “That’s sweet of you,” he said. “But she could start a fire here too. She needs supervision.”

  “You want to put her away in that nursing home, don’t you?”