The weather will be mostly cloudy today with scattered
thundershowers in the afternoon. Drivers, proceed with
caution. Pay attention, now! I know what I'm talking about.
โ Joseph "Rainman" Jones, WTUP-FM Radio
I'mdriving along in a fog, which is my life in a nutshell.
A year ago when I divorced Stanley, I expected heroes to
line up outside my door to worship at the shrine of my pot
roast and my crotchless panties. What I got was one hot
hunk who loved shrines but hated commitment and one
geriatric who drooled his soup and peed on the toilet seat.
After I finally fled a marriage I couldn't fix, I saw my
future self as happily re-wed, gainfully employed and
skinny. I'm none of the above. What I am is forty-one and
lost โ in more ways than one โ and even if I had a map, I
couldn't see the road. Fog shrouds everything, including
my Jeep, as I inch down what I hope is Highway 371 to
rescue Mama.
That's me. Maggie Dufrane. Rescuer of stray cats, wounded
dogs, latchkey kids, lonely old farts, sick neighbors and
a seventy-five-year-old mama.
There ought to be a law against emergency phone calls at
five o'clock in the morning, especially from my sister,
Jean, who equates hangnails and bad haircuts with floods
and tornadoesโฆand who feels compelled to ask my opinion
about all of them.
Her alarmist viewpoint explains why I didn't bolt out of
bed this morning when she wailed, "Maggie, you've got to
come."
"Jean, do you know what time it is? This had better be
good."
"It's Mama. She fell and banged her head. She called me a
little while ago, crying."
Her words jolted me awake. Granted, Mama is feisty and
dramatic. Once an actress, she's partial to histrionics
that involve wild gestures, contorted features and a
raised voice. But tears? Never!
I leaped from the covers, got tangled in the phone cord
and fell in a heap with yesterday's sweatpants.
"What are we going to do, Maggie?" Jean blubbered.
Although she's two years older than I, she has been asking
me that question all my life. She asked it thirty years
ago when our Persian cat got stuck in a tree and wouldn't
come down. She asked it when she leaned too close to the
candles at her wedding rehearsal and her hair caught fire.
She asked it when Daddy's pickup truck fell through the
bridge and he floated to Glory Land on the Tombigbee River.
"Just hang on, Jean," I told her, as I have a thousand
times. "I'll think of something."
And I willโฆthe minute I assess the situation. I always do.
Right now, though, I'm concentrating on driving. Today is
Saturday, April fifteenth, my birthday. I hadn't planned
to be a one-man cavalry. What I'd meant to do was ease out
of bed around nine o'clock, indulge in a long bubble bath,
then pamper myself with a leisurely breakfast of freshly
squeezed orange juice and croissants with strawberry jam,
alfresco. That means "on the fire escape" because my
downtown Tupelo apartment building was once a department
store whose owners had no need for balconies โ and the
current management considers adding them frivolous.
What I'm doing, instead, is charging forth in my ex-
husband's once-white dress shirt, gray sweatpants cast off
from yesterday's workout at Curves and redsequined flip-
flops, the only evidence of my plans for decadence and
celebration.
As the clock inches toward six, the scattered patches of
fog begin to lift and I can see the lake that borders
Mama's north pasture. What if she's badly hurt? What will
I do?
Though I pretend otherwise, I don't have all the answers.
If I did, I'd have a house, a mortgage and a sex life. I'm
not even close to having any of those things, which
explains why I can be thrilled by the thought of a
birthday celebration on a fire escape.
Alone, on the fire escape.
Now I've cracked open the door, and Depression pokes his
giant foot through. The next thing I know he'll have his
big hairy self sitting on the front seat, and then who
will rescue Mama? Who will play taxicab driver for Jean,
who backed Daddy's car over a hydrangea bush when she was
fifteen and never saw the need to master reverse? Or
forward, either, for that matter, especially after Mama
said, "Let Maggie try it. She's efficient."
I switch away from the patter of Tupelo's most popular DJ,
Joseph "Rainman" Jones, to a station that plays music,
hoping to boost my spirits by warbling along to "Blue Eyes
Crying in the Rain" with Willie Nelson. That's me, Miss
Efficient and Cheerful.
Reliable, too, the one you want to call when something
goes wrong.
I peer into the lingering mists for any lurking hydrangea
bushes or stray cattle that might waylay me. I'm in rural
Mississippi now, the farm country of my childhood where
haylofts know how to become castles and tree branches know
how to become race-horses worthy of the Kentucky Derby.
Jean is waiting for me on Mama's front porch, her pink
slacks inside out and her matching pink tennis shoes dew-
soaked from the grassy pasture that separates her house
from Mama's. Her blond hair sticks up like the feathers of
baby birds as she rushes toward me.
"Mama's got the dead bolts on. I can't get in."
"Where is she? Can you see her?"
"No, but I can hear her moaning."
I rattle the front door and yell, "Mama! Mama, can you
hear me?"
"Ohhh. Ohhhh." Mama is either gasping her last breath or
auditioning to be a ghost for Halloween. With her, it's
hard to tell. Once, when she was recovering from the flu,
she telephoned at 6:00 a.m. to say I had to hurry right
over, it was an emergency. On the drive I imagined finding
her relapsed and half-dead. She was dying, all right, she
said, from starvation, but didn't feel like frying the
bacon herself.
Now panicked, Jean races around the house to scope the
south side while I jerk screens off the front porch
windows and shove against casements to see if one of them
can be opened without breaking the glass.
"Maggie, around here. Quick."
"What?" To save time I jump off the side of the porch, but
the dew-slick grass outsmarts me and I meet the damp
ground with a thud. Jean grabs my arm and hauls me up.
"Hurry. You've got to climb through that window." She
points to a south-facing window with a narrow slit at the
bottom where it's not quite connected to the sill.
"You're shorter, Jean. I'll hoist you up."
"If you think I can get my forty-five-inch butt through
that thirty-six-inch opening, you're crazy."
I'm not about to admit the size of my hips, so I step into
Jean's cupped hands, grab hold of the window-sill and thenโฆ
nothing.
"You can do it, Maggie. Come on. Heave-ho!"
"I'm heaving, I'm heaving."
Inside, Mama's still moaning. And now, so is Jefferson,
the ten-year-old golden retriever who is her companion,
her watchdog and her best friend. If this were the movies,
he'd be trained to open the door with his mouth and swab
her forehead with a wet washcloth clutched in his paw.
Who am I kidding? If this were the movies, I'd rewrite the
ending. Heck, I'd rewrite the middle, too. Instead of
teetering on the windowsill over a thorny lantana with
rescue on my mind, I'd be on a yacht in the Mediterranean
with my rich husband, the Duke of Somewhere Important,
with something else entirely on my mind. Food, if you want
to know the truth, which just goes to show the alarming
shifts that come with a certain age. What I'm thinking
about is having a personal chef who hand-feeds me squab
and pears glazed with honey.
"She's dying in there." Jean destroys my honey-glazed
vision. "You've got to climb in and get her."
"Where's Walter when we need him?" Jean's husband, who
works for an international environmental company, puts
together deals to convert garbage to usable goods. His
sumo-wrestler looks and teddy-bear personality make him
hugely popular and successful.
"He had to fly to Japan yesterday. Hurry, Maggie." Jean
puts her weight behind me and I catapult sideways into the
lantana.
"Oh, lord, you're going to end up in the hospital with
Mama."
"I am not. If you'll just stop wringing your hands and
give me another boost, I'm going through that window."
Jean starts praying, and this time I get through, thanks
to guts and grace.
Mama is stretched out on the floor with Jefferson lying
beside her, his big head pillowed on her chest. They both
raise their heads at the same time.
"What took you so long?" Mama says. The skin on her
forehead is peeled back to the bone and blood is caked
around the gaping wound. My knees feel wobbly and my
stomach churns. The only thing that saves me is Mama.
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