Jessie

As a first-born, type-A, Catholic worrier growing up in a small town one long summer, you might make goals for yourself. Say the Rosary eight times in one day because that will make up for pinching your brother (with fingernails). Check. Tell Grandma Bee that yes, you maybe might kinda wanna be a nun when you grow up. Check. Read all your grandma’s little Lives of the Saints books to make up for the fact that you watched about half of The Blue Lagoon with a half-naked Brooke Shields on The Movie Channel in your parents’ room when everybody thought you were cleaning your own room. Check.

After that, where do you go? Well, if you live one block from an old folks’ home, you might shine your light of holy love there. You could volunteer. Be a visitor. Serve lemonade on the deck on Fridays at 1:00 with a sign on the bulletin board to make it official. Done.

Let’s say you go over to The Manor regularly and meet lots of people. Maybe walking slowly down the hall of the third and topmost floor you read the names on the doors, looking for someone to visit: Agnes, Lillian, Dorothy, Leonard, Harold, but it’s the only Chinese man in the building, one of the only Chinese people you’ve ever met in your whole life, Mr. Lin, who invites you in for a candied date. You sit carefully on the edge of the couch in his one room apartment noticing that the door to his shared bathroom is open. You smell baby powder and maple syrup. Sitting here and smiling will help. Will help him pass the time, and will help you to do something in that weird growing up place where you don’t want be your own subject constantly, but you can’t stop obsessing and scrutinizing. You smile and take a smallish bite of your first candied date as Mr. Lin begins his life story in Chinese.

Another day, you sit for a while in the smoke-hazy confines of Bonnie Rizzo’s room. She tells you about her dead husband in the croakiest voice you’ve ever heard, chain-smoking the whole time. She gets rid of a live cigarette by tossing it into the round metal garbage can that is full of paper. You are startled, but outwardly calm, and use a glass of water to put out the small fire while she continues to talk.

But it’s Jessie, a woman with a granddaughter in your own class at school whom you befriend and really get to know. Visiting with her isn’t like visiting with the others; you’re not just trying to plug up the worry and the guilt with something good. You like her. And she makes you feel helpful. You enjoy walking to McDonalds to get her the salty fries that are not on her “allowed foods” list in the home. And when you find out that she hasn’t been outside in almost two years, you enlist your two trusty friends to help wheel her out for a walk and have a scare as you almost dump her out of her chair trying to go down a curb.

Jessie tells you that it took her nine years to go through menopause, and you have absolutely no idea what that means. She tells you about her first husband, who died, and she cries. The second one never really loved her, just wanted her to work. There was a sick child. She talks about wars you don’t even know about from school. You help her move her things around on the shelves in her room and dust a little. You laugh at the words to some old songs she sings. And it isn’t work. It isn’t hard. It makes you forget the bright sun shining on some of your cooler schoolmates as they skateboard down the front sidewalk below.

Sometimes, around 4 o’clock, still time before dinner and before your own mom will be looking for you, Jessie’s lying on her narrow bed in her darkened room wearing one of her worn, snap-up housecoats, and you’re sitting next to her in the wooden rocker. You steadily read aloud every word of another Southern romance printed on the pages of a weekly women’s magazine. This is Jessie’s favorite thing that you do for her. You are comfortable, equal, even though you’re 12, and she’s 86. You have a place here and a reason. Jessie almost has a smile on her face as her eyes scan the ceiling back and forth and close for a while. With surprising authority, and a new sense of peace, your voice lifts and falls.