The World and Everything in It Stops and Waits and Considers Whether or Not to Go On

Lori Jakiela

“How’s the teaching going?” my mother asks.

I’ve heard her on the phone to the neighbors. “My daughter, the professor,” she says. It sounds impressive. It’s not.

I work at a branch campus of a corporation posing as a university. I make just slightly more money than I did as a flight attendant. My office is in the basement next to the boiler room. The dean gives junior faculty like me a cruel mix of early morning and night classes because he believes it builds character.

“He’ll make exceptions if you sleep with him,” a senior faculty member told me.

The dean jogs around campus in red booty shorts. He dyes his hair the color of wet asphalt. There’s often hair dye smudged around his forehead, on the tips of his ears. His forehead is square and high. His teeth are too big, too shiny, like blank Scrabble tiles slicked with Vaseline.

A few days ago, he cornered me with his idea of a serious academic question. “Are you a new woman?” he asked. “Or an old woman?” Then he winked and walked away. 

“I’m fine. Teaching’s good,” I tell my mother. “I’m happy to be home.”

I tell myself this, too. I recite it like a mantra. It’s what I’m telling myself now as I down my fourth cup of coffee and try to focus. It’s Wednesday, 8:45 a.m. One of my journalism students is recounting an interview she’s done with Mister Rogers’ estranged sister Elaine.    

“I think she’s still angry about the whole Lady Elaine thing? You know, the puppet with the big nose with the wart on it?” Shannon says. “The really ugly one who lives in the Museum Go Round?”

Shannon’s favorite color is bright orange, the kind hunters wear so they don’t get shot. Shannon is very blonde. She looks lovely in orange, like the high beams on an expensive car, but it’s early. Looking directly at Shannon hurts my eyes, so I study my coffee. I swish and swirl and stare as if there’s something magical—the future maybe—in the sludge-stained bottom of my cup.

“See, the thing is, Mr. Rogers modeled Lady Elaine after her?” Shannon says. “She’s still not over it?”

Everything Shannon says is a question.

Shannon is the sun asking permission to shine.

I’ve never thought about all the characters in Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood—prissy King Friday in his petticoats; X the Owl, a fraud taking correspondence classes; scared little Henrietta Pussycat, who knew few words other than “meow.” It never occurred to me until now that they might be based on real people. Since Pittsburgh was Mister Rogers’ real-life neighborhood, these people would likely be local. Real, local people who, when confronted with the puppet versions of themselves, wouldn’t always like what they saw.

“There’s only one of everybody, toots,” Lady Elaine liked to say.

It’s hard to imagine Mr. Rogers estranged from anyone. It’s hard to imagine him ever being cruel.

“Sounds like you have a great story,” I tell Shannon. “You’ve got news value—conflict, proximity, celebrity, human interest. Run with it.”

I haven’t been a reporter in a newsroom for 14 years, but I still say things like “news value” and “run with it” and “you’ve buried your lede.” I still love the archaic smell of newsprint. I still love the idea that stories, when they’re told right, can change things.

I finish my coffee and say, “O.K. Who’s next?” when there’s a knock on the door. The knock is loud, urgent, bone on wood. It’s Bernie. Bernie makes an eye shield with her hands and presses her face to the glass. 

If Mr. Rogers knew Bernie, the faculty secretary, maybe he’d have based a puppet on her. Bernie wears astonishingly bright makeup, all pinks and purples and blues. Her clothes are tight and cinched with a belt. Her white blonde hair is usually done up in a ponytail or a twist, cheerleader style, with sparkly barrettes and bows. Bernie is in her fifties. When she was young, she’d been a cheerleader. Now she makes everything about herself perky. But Bernie isn’t perky. She’s miserable. She hates her job. She hates the other secretaries. She hates liberal types, people like college professors and students. And she hates the first-floor copy machine, which is located right outside my office door.

“They don’t pay me enough to deal with this crapola,” she told me one day after she’d kicked the machine twice and left a dent. “Just yesterday, I got toner all in my face. It spit at me. There was toner in my nose, in my hair, everything. I looked like,” and here she paused, looked around, and lowered her voice, the way people do when they talk about cancer, the way they do when they’re about to say something they know they shouldn’t even think. “A black woman.”

I usually stay clear of Bernie. Now here she is, first thing in the morning, her rainbow-colored face filling the window. This can’t be good, but there’s nothing else to do. I wave her in.

“I thought you’d want to see this,” she says and hands me a note. “I think it’s an emergency. I figured I’d want to know if I were you.”

The note says, “Call home. Your mother’s sick.”

Then Bernie does something unexpected. She squeezes my arm. It is a kind, small gesture.

“We have to stop here,” I tell the class.

Michael, a kid who’s been slouched over in the back row sleeping, jolts, then bobs back down. Shannon starts to say, “What are we supposed to do,” but before she can finish, I’m gone.

***

By the time I make it from campus to my mother’s house, our neighbor Margie is there. Margie is a nurse, like my mother. They worked together at Braddock Hospital years ago and have been friends ever since.

Margie is kneeling next to my mother, who is lying on the couch in the living room.

“She’s being stubborn. As usual,” Margie says. Margie’s hair is dyed the color of dried blood.

She is trying to hold my mother’s hand. My mother keeps pulling away. Margie is talking loud and slow, sing-song-y, as if my mother and I didn’t speak English, as if we couldn’t understand what she was trying to say.

Margie says, “I told her ‘Bert, let me call the ambulance.’I said, ‘Bert, let’s get you out of here.’ But she wouldn’t have it.” My mother flops her head deeper into the pillow. Margie’s face scrunches up like she’s about to be hit.

Margie says, less sing-song-y now, “She wants you to take her.”

“I don’t want a fuss,” my mother says. She looks pale and waxy. Sometime before all this, she’d packed a bag with her slippers, nightgown, and toothpaste. She’s been sick so often, she knows the routine. The bag is there, waiting where she’d put it, by the door.

“You know how the neighbors are,” she says. “They see an ambulance and they stand around and gawk. I don’t want everyone looking at me. I’m not an invalid. Now let’s go.”

But she doesn’t move. She looks furious. She looks like she might cry. I sit down near her head, smooth her hair away from her face. She doesn’t try to stop me, even though her hair will be standing up and a mess and she’ll hate that. We stay there for what feels like too long—we should rush, get up, get going—but it’s probably only seconds.

I’m starting to believe life is full of little deaths, moments that feel like the world and everything in it stops and waits and considers whether or not to go on.

Margie is still talking, but she sounds as if she’s floating away.

***

Margie is just a few years older than me. She has three great kids, left her nursing job to stay home, never forgets a birthday or anniversary, likes pipe-cleaner crafts, and dotes on my mother. During the time I’d been away from home, Margie took on the role of my mother’s other daughter.

“She’s the good one,” my mother says, and I always check to see if she’s joking. I don’t think she is. Margie has always been there. I have not.

“Are you a new woman?” the dean had asked. “Or an old woman?”Modern or old-world.Selfish or selfless.

After my father died, I tried to go back to work at my old job with the airlines.  I took a trip to Brussels, a 24-hour layover.  I’d thought going back to work would be a good thing. My original plan wasn’t to move home. It was to commute between Pittsburgh and my airline’s base in New York. I’d fly a three-day trip, then come home to check on my mother. I was finally senior enough to hold a good schedule—three days on, three days off. When I had to fly, I wouldn’t be gone long, and I hoped it would help my mother adjust. If we acted like the world would go on, I thought, it would.

At around 3 a.m. Brussels’ time, the phone rang in my hotel room. I was awake. I’d forgotten to pack the over-the-counter sleeping pills I’d been using to ward off jet lag. I liked the pills, the blank chemical sleep that kept me from dreaming.

When the phone rang, I’d just gotten out of the bathtub. I was eating my way through a bag of mushroom-shaped truffles and watching the world news. I picked up, figuring it was the front desk or a wrong number. It was a supervisor from my airline.

“Darlin’,” the voice on the phone said, a thick southern accent, the words fluffed up like a feather bed. “Your mother had a heart attack, a small one. Don’t worry. She’s fine. Your neighbor Margie is trying to reach you. Here’s the number. You can call now. We’d get you on the first flight out, but you’re already working it. Sorry, darlin’.”

I called my mother’s hospital room. Margie answered, and I was relieved my mother wasn’t alone. But I felt something else, too, something that, as an only child, I’d never felt before. I’m not sure there’s a word for it, but if there was, it would be something territorial, something awful stirred up by grief and fear.

I should have been with my mother. I needed to be there. I wasn’t there. Margie was. And I hated it. I hated Margie. I hated myself. I hated that I’d chosen to keep flying, that I’d tried to go on as if everything was the way it always was. It seemed selfish and hopeless. I felt all of this, all at once, alone in this hotel where, the next morning, I’d have difficulty explaining to the French-speaking woman at the front desk that I didn’t have money to pay the phone bill.

“Perhaps you should have considered this,” she’d say.

When Margie picked up the phone, my voice cracked. I pulled the hotel robe tight around me.

“Don’t worry,” Margie said. “She’s fine.”

I said, “Put my mother on the phone.”

“She’s fine,” Margie said. “She’s tired.”

I said, “Put her on.”

There was fumbling and static. Whispering. Finally, my mother’s voice, drugged and weak, barely
there at all.

She said, “Is that you?”

She said, “Where are you?”

***

“All of us have special ones who loved us into being,” Mr. Rogers said once during a speech. He asked everyone to take ten seconds to think of these people. Ten seconds of silence. Then he looked at his watch.  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll watch the time.”

I look at my mother on the couch. Margie, this room, everything falls away. Here in these silent seconds, it’s only my mother and me. I stroke my mother’s hair, her face, and my mother, fragile and small as a child, closes her eyes and lets me.

Lori Jakiela is the author of a memoir, Miss New York Has Everything, and three poetry chapbooks. Her full-length poetry collection, Spot the Terrorist!, will be published in April 2012, and her second memoir, The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious, will be published in December 2012. Her essays and poems have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The New Yinzer, Brevity and elsewhere.