Ma was the queen of advice, the "Dear Abby" of Logan Square. Never fall for a poor man, she said, which meant she'd ignored her own good counsel, twice.
She advised friends and neighbors, strangers, too, but reserved the choicest directives for me.
"Never get old," she said recently.
She left me and the words to chill on the outside stoop then marched into her overheated kitchen, the room where she'd scorched countless holiday birds and sweet potato pies, overcooked hot-cross buns and those tooth-ache sweet, upside-down cakes. This was the room where Russell Gares probed my mouth with his amazing tongue then pinned me to the wall like a fluttering moth. And then there was Buddy, my half-brother, who karate-kicked the pantry, only to get stuck in the plaster and require a rescue. My father (unsuitable husband number two) stormed from this small, steamy kitchen after Ma suggested he take a long vacation. He liked the idea and left that night then died of lung cancer nine months later.
Haunted. Ma's kitchen could keep a medium entranced for years.
"Don't get old!" she repeated.
"Too late."
"Ridiculous. If you're old, I'm old."
"Precisely, Ma."
She tossed her head. Her gray bobbed hair bounced against her shoulders. Despite thick, corrective lenses and the crepey fullness of her neck, I caught a glimpse of the glory days--the silvery-blue eyes, high cheekbones and those generous lips that once stopped traffic with a flirty smile. Years ago, our neighborhood butcher, Mr. Fitzpatrick, made a point of stroking Ma's slender hands whenever he counted out change. How she laughed, I recall, a deep throaty laugh of unmistakable pleasure.
"Age is ... a mere number," she said.
"The lower the better," I quipped.
She frowned and smacked me, playfully. She put the kettle on then swung around, right hand over her good breast, the one that continued to shun radiation and/or disfiguring surgery. She'd sacrificed the other breast to paralytic fear and expert opinion, only to find later that the radical mastectomy had been ... unnecessarily radical.
"Numbers are irrelevant," she said. "It's all about the heart. Every day, you need a hard flutter, a boom-de-boom. Music helps. Show tunes can send the heart aflutter. The people you love works best. The heart, Lou. You're my only daughter. You need to know."
I nodded though I didn't know. Not then.
Two weeks later, I received a call while leaving my last class. I was teaching comparative religion studies at a local community college. My students, as ethnically diverse as their fevered opinions, were embroiled in a spirited debate over Christian versus Islamic justice. The bitter irony hadn't escaped me-the coursework was meant to inspire tolerance and religious understanding, yet the readings seemed to provoke the reverse: I'm right, you're wrong, end of story. I'd been planning to shift the conversation to something else, the Beatitudes, perhaps, when my cell phone rang.
Ma had been rushed to an ICU after collapsing outside her Vine Street row home. She'd been hauling two large shopping bags and wore a belly bag loaded with loose change. She'd spent the afternoon at an outside street fair on Penn's Landing, I learned later, and refused to let go of her purchases even when the EMTs arrived. She was in critical condition now; a heart attack, the doctors suspected. Could I come, quickly?
I grabbed a cab. I was at the Thomas Jefferson Heart Institute in less than ten minutes, but when I asked at the ICU nursing station for Elizabeth Harker, the young woman behind the computer blinked, shuffled some papers and said she'd be right back.
The attending physician said he was sorry but they'd lost Ma as if she'd wandered off without a chaperone. The medical team had done everything they could, the doctor assured me. There were papers to fill out and insurance considerations. I demanded to see her first.
The gurney had been tucked into a corner. Ma's last resting place was behind a flimsy white curtain that went click, click, click on a metal ceiling track. The nurse who accompanied me pulled the curtain with a white plastic wand then gently pulled the sheet from Ma's face.
"I'll give you some privacy," she said in a kind voice.
I nodded but privacy seemed unnecessary. Conversation, intimacy and all the things we take for granted was irrelevant now. But I noticed this: how small my mother looked, more like a wizened child than the eighty-three year old woman she'd been. Her shopping bags and belly belt had been tucked in a clear plastic bag and stowed beside the bed.
I took her hand. I stroked her long, slender fingers, then hummed a verse of "New York, New York," her all-time favorite. When I was finished, I pulled her shopping bags from the plastic carrier. Slipping Ma's belly bag on, I tightened the strap then headed for the stairs. Before I reached the first landing, my heart was thumping. The beat grew stronger and wilder once I reached the street that came alive, buzzed with shoppers and vendors, the screech of buses and rush hour traffic. I had an urge to walk towards Delaware Avenue, take a stroll along the pier when an elderly man stopped and asked for directions to Delancey Place.
"You want to go uptown," I said. "Off 16th."
He took my hand then and stroked it, gently, almost lovingly. "Thank you," he said. "You've saved an old man some steps and none of us are getting any younger." Then he winked.
I'm not a person who believes in signs or New Age portents. I'm not the sort to take a stranger's peculiar words to heart, not even in the City of Brotherly Love. But I nodded and watched the man disappear into the crowd because that's when I knew.
It was a boom-de-boom moment. It was Ma saying "good-bye."
Margaret A. Frey writes from the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. Her work has been published in flashquake, Cezanne's Carrot, Notre Dame Magazine, Smokelong Quarterly, ByLine Magazine, Thema and elsewhere. Most recent or forthcoming work appears in Birmingham Arts Journal, Bent Pin Quarterly and Trillium Literary Journal. Margaret was a 2003 finalist in the Erma Bombeck writing competition and a Writer's Digest Chronicle winner. In December 2007, her flash "Riding the Coma" took first place in Cezanne's Carrot Return of the Light contest. Margaret lives with her husband John and canine literary critic, Ruffian. She can be reached at: mafrey@tds.net.