FROM THE ARCHIVES: “Ms. Myra” by Lorenzo Laing (2013)

(The following story was originally published in the Fall 2013 Issue of the Nassau Literary Review.)

“Mmm…mm…mm…” she grumbled, “ain’t nothin’ ever on TV at this hour.”

***

After Ms. Myra’s neurologist appointment earlier today, we stopped for dinner at Kuntry Bickle, a Jamaican restaurant on 157th. So with nothing to cook, she found herself sitting on the old, leather armchair, directly in front of the way-too-old Magnavox television, earlier than usual. She wore the same off-white night gown she’d worn for years — the one stained from splashes of cooking oil, spilled bleach, and food particles wiped from the corner children’s mouths. Her arms were folded, and her legs, wrinkled and plump, were crossed at the ankles. She cycled through the channels, with her cheeks tight, lips pursed and brows furrowed; she was exasperated by both the lack of programming she liked and the abundance of everything else.

***

“Darius, you remember to take out the trash?”

“Yes, Ms. Myra”

“‘Cause you know I don’t want no piles of trash in my kitchen.”

“I know..”

“…Darius,” she called a few moments later, “where Adonis went?” She asked in such a way that implied he had gone out without her permission.

“He went to college. Remember?”

“College? Oh… mhm,” she nodded, “…college… college..” She repeated things to herself a lot these days, trying to internalize what she had been told she had forgotten. “Mmm… Lord give me strength with this oldtimers.”

***

Ms. Myra has Alzheimer’s, and because of what happened a couple of weeks ago, I stay with her at night now. I guess I shouldn’t complain because it was kind of my fault, but things would be easier if the others were still here. Since Adonis went to Morehouse last year, I’m the only one left. But there used to be five of us: Elisha, Jessica, Kiesha Adonis and me. Ms. Myra took us all into her modest house here on 140th Street in St. Albans, Queens, at a point in our lives when the system, unofficially, declared us “un-adoptable.” “Ain’t no child I can’t handle, and ain’t nothin’ I can’t teach ’em neither,” she’d say, “nothin’ ‘cept numbers. But that’s what school’s fo’ ain’t it?” And she made sure of it.

***

“Darius, you finish yo’ homework yet?”

“Some of it, Ms. Myra.”

“Well you betta’ finish all of it,” she said, “ because I’m not gon’ have no child in my…”

“..house without an education,” I finished for her, because she has reminded us of this our entire lives.

***

I guess Jessica forgot one time, and she got a pretty bad whooping because of it. It was back when she was in high school and had a geometry final coming up, and she told Ms. Myra she was going over to Tiana’s house to study. But when Jessica got home, she was caught standing outside the gate with Tarrel Anderson. And just before their lips touched, Ms. Myra shouted, “BOY, YOU BETTER BE LEANIN’ IN TO TELL THAT GIRL A SECRET!” so loud that the entire neighborhood was probably curious as to what secret this guy had for my sister. Tarrel jumped and darted around the corner of the block. Jessica, with her eyes to her shoes, and Ms. Myra’s eyes on her, walked into the house, well aware of what was to follow.

It lasted for about an hour, because I heard them go upstairs when American Idol started, and they didn’t come down until it had ended. I figured it was pretty serious from the start, because Ms. Myra never missed her favorite contestant, her “teddybear Ruben Studdard,” sing. And in that time, I first heard the crack of Ms. Myra’s belt — which was used not for upholding pants, but solely for teaching lessons — followed by Jessica’s wails. Accordingly, a lecture followed, one that this time included: “girl, don’ you ever think ‘bout lyin’ to me again,” and “you gon’ be studyin’ for that test until yo’ teacher puts it on yo’ desk tomorrow.”

Don’t get me wrong, Ms. Myra only did things like that when she was particularly upset about something. Whenever she felt it was absolutely necessary to reminded us that she “don’t waste no energy on nobody.” It worked, though, because Jessica is a senior at Howard now on a full scholarship.

***

“Darius, you eat yet?”

“I did.”

“You sure? ’Cause I don’t wanna hear nothin’ bout no ‘hungry’ after I’m ready for bed.”

“Positive.”

***

She didn’t remember we had gotten dinner before we came home, but she remembered that today is Tuesday, and that she always makes macaroni and collard greens on Tuesday nights, as she has done for the past seventeen years. Apparently it was Mr. Richard’s favorite, and she just kept making it for us even after he left her. Or after she made him leave. One of the two. That part was never clear. But I do remember the woman. She messed a lot of things up.

A few years ago, I was walking back to 140th after school. When I got to 137th, I saw Mr. Richard’s car parked at a hydrant, with him and another woman inside. When he saw me, he looked surprised, but then kind of nodded, as if to say, “Nothing’s up, lil’ man. I’ll see you at home.” But even at age twelve, I knew. I knew the woman in the car couldn’t just be a friend. Her nails were too long, her hair too red, her dress too short and the circumference of her earrings too great. Her appearance was such a way that I was sure Ms. Myra would not have approved had she seen them together. And she didn’t.

On her way home from mass at St. Thomas, she spotted them, too. Later that night there was a lot of “who was that tramp” and “you always be overreactin’”and “I’ll be damned if I let you spoil my babies” and “don’t nobody want you or them kids anyway.” In the movies, after big fights like that one, the man leaves and the woman tucks herself away and cries. But not Ms. Myra. Immediately after Mr. Richard left, with only the clothes on his back, she went right on to scouring the bathtub, because she “wasn’t gon’ let no man interfere with her life.”

***

After settling on Jeopardy, which she often made us watch when we were little “‘cause we might learn some’m,” she reclined further into her armchair, rubbing her ashen toes together, picking at the adhesive on her bandaged arm. “Jesus, this thing gon’ itch me to death! How much longer the doctor say I gotta wear this, Darius?”

“About a week”

“A week! Boy, it’s been almost, what… I don’t even remember!”

“Yea, but don’t touch it. Please?” I asked. She grumbled and readjusted in her chair.

“Darius, you put the dishes to soak? she said a few moments later, “‘cause you know they get hard to wash if…”

“Yea, yea…I know, I know,” I joked.

“Boy, don’t get fresh wit’ me,” she said, with her gaze still fixed on Alex Trabek. I play around with her sometimes, because I know how she gets.

***

Ms. Myra doesn’t take disrespect from anybody. Not her kids, not her lovers, not her friends, not the mailman, not the President of the United States. And she especially doesn’t take kindly to the disrespect of those “who didn’t do nothin’ to deserve no foolishness from other people.” From people like Sherry Thompson, the woman who used to live in the yellow house down the block. Ms. Myra and Sherry… well, Ms. Myra told me it was okay to call her that, because “women as wicked as her didn’t deserve the lint from dirty draws, let alone ‘miss.’” It was clear Ms. Myra and Sherry never never got along: they would give each other cross looks on the street, sit in pews on opposite ends of the church, and refer to the other simply as “that woman” in conversation. They have probably been enemies since before we left foster care, and it was just last year that they both had finally had enough.

Mr. Miller was an older man who had gotten mixed up at some point in life, and January of last year, in the prime of winter, he found himself huddled in heavy green jackets, occupying a small space on pieces of cardboard on the corner of Sutton Boulevard and 139th. He sat outside all day with a styrofoam cup that read, “Times tuf. Pleez donate, ” waiting for spare change in a neighborhood that didn’t have much of anything to spare. Yet Ms. Myra always tried to give him something when she could. She knew “it could barely buy bread, but at least it made him feel a lil’ better ‘bout himself.” Sherry, however, did not share the same sympathy Ms. Myra had for Mr. Miller. Because after tripping over him and his cup on her way back from the laundromat, Sherry did not help him retrieve his few dollars that were carried away by the January winds, and thereby unretrievable for a man his age. All she offered was her “shapeless behind,” as Ms. Myra would say, as she walked away in disgust. And after watching this unfold from our living room window, Ms. Myra dropped her broom where she stood and marched outside, coatless.

Although Ms. Myra was no more than an inch taller than Sherry, her stance, perfectly erect and arms akimbo, allowed her to tower over the woman. “You better be on yo’ way home to get yo’ runnin’ shoes to catch them dolla’s,” she shouted.

Sherry froze, exasperated, ready for yet another dispute with Ms. Myra, but unaware, like Ms. Myra herself, that this would be their final quarrel.

“Myra, go inside,” Sherry retaliated, glancing at her in the same manner as she had Mr. Miller, “you lookin’ crazy enough already, wit’ yo’ old, coatless ass.” Mistake. After “old,” I saw Ms. Myra’s brows rise and nostrils flare.

This was the one time I ever felt sorry for Sherry.

Ms. Myra lunged forward, swiftly extended her arm, retracted it with a handful of Sherry’s lace front wig and held it in the air, watching it blow in the same wind that had carried Mr. Miller’s dollars. At that time, Ms. Myra was seventy-nine, but, somehow, she was as quick then as she had been in her twenties. Sherry was left grasping at her patchy scalp, and exposed to the entire neighborhood that watched cautiously through the slits of their curtains. “Cross me or this man again, and I’m goin’ for them roots next time. Hussy.” Ms. Myra threatened. Sherry sprinted down the block and into her house, as quickly as an embarrassed woman in cheap heels could.

Later that night, Ms. Myra opened our home to Mr. Miller, offering him as much as she could give: Mr. Richard’s old sweaters, slices of honey-roasted turkey, and, for the next few nights, the spare bed in our basement. Some would later question why Ms. Myra would let a complete stranger into her home, “especially with kids in the house.” To which she would respond, “let me see YOU try to sleep outside on twenty degree night, sweetie.”

***

“Ms. Myra, if you keeping picking at the bandage…”

“A’ight, a’ight, Darius. I hear you.”

***

I should tell you, though, that comments regarding us, her children, came up every so often, and were not always nice: “The woman got too many damn kids. Kids that ain’t even hers. Mmm….And not enough money.” They never thought she heard, but she always did, and sometimes felt it. She never said anything out loud, but I knew what it meant when she would walked a little faster and hold my hand a little tighter as we passed them. But I never understood these people. Because they didn’t know her.

They never saw her wake up at 5 AM on a Saturday morning to get us ready for a surprise trip. They never saw her take us on the bus, with rollers and all in her hair, for a two hour ride to Adventureland. They never saw her use the money she had won at Bingo to buy our admission tickets. They never saw her when she let Adonis stand on her shoes so that he’d be tall enough to ride the Hurricane Coaster. They never saw her help Jessica shoot hoops for a stuffed animal. They never saw her protect Kiesha and Elisha from the circus clowns. They never saw her ride the Lady Bug with me so that I wouldn’t be alone. They never saw her laugh with us as we ran out of the park, just barely catching the last bus back to Queens. They never saw how much she loved us.

***

It three weeks ago, on July fourth. I was going to my friend Jordan’s barbecue in Rochdale Village, which is about twenty minutes from our house. I was five minutes away from his apartment when Ms. Myra called, asking me to pick up some Basmati rice because she had nothing to supplement the chicken curry she was cooking. I’m obviously used to running errands for Ms. Myra, as the five of us had been all our lives, because she didn’t want anybody “sittin’ up in her house doin’ nothin’.” So last minute one’s like this came as no surprise. But I was almost there and didn’t feel like getting off the bus to pick up a heavy bag of rice and lug it around St. Albans in the heat. Nor did I think it was fair I had to do everything by myself now. So, because I’m an idiot, I told Ms. Myra I would, but instead turned off my phone and stayed on the damn bus.

As I now understand it, after growing too tired and too hungry to wait for me to come home, Ms. Myra went the supermarket herself. She left around 9PM, and when I got home at 12AM, the house was empty. I knew something wasn’t right not because she wasn’t home so late, but because her pot of chicken curry had bubbled over onto the floor, and Ms. Myra hates both a messy kitchen and wasted food. I immediately turned on my phone, only after remembering it had been off for the past nine hours. Seven missed calls: the first two from our house phone at 5PM and 8:30PM, the next three from an unknown number at 10:27PM and every ten minutes thereafter, and the last from “LIJ” at 11:25PM. Other than the first two, I had never seen those numbers before. Soon after, the “LIJ” number called again, informing me Ms. Myra was at “Long Island Jewish Medical Center with a gash in her arm and a broken index finger, but otherwise in stable condition,” a receptionist said casually, as if she had gone out of her way to do her job. Bitch.

I caught the Q2 on Farmers, then transferred to the Q27, and finally took the Q46 directly to Long Island Jewish. On any other occasion, I would have been pissed about all those transfers, but I was preoccupied with being pissed at myself; for the entire ride, all could think was “if I had just gone to the damn supermarket,” and the smell of charcoal and beer that lingered on my clothes was nauseating.

When I got to the hospital — a whole two hours later — I found Ms. Myra in her bed with a thick blue bandage around her right arm, and her finger in a cast. I expected to find her asleep, but I should have known better; she was sitting up, cycling through the television channels, which there were more of here, yet unsatisfied as usual. A police officer sat in the chair beside her with an empty coffee cup in one hand and his head resting in the palm of the other, suggesting he was only there because Ms. Myra had forbid him to leave, for what ever reason. “This your son, miss?” he asked Ms. Myra.

“Boy, there you are. Mhm, this my son, Mista’ Offica.’”

“Good,” he yawned, “as you can see, sir, your mother had a bit of an accident. We picked her up over in Hollis…”

“Hollis?” I interrupted, “but we live in St. Albans.”

“Yes, Hollis. Apparently her cane had gotten stuck in the crack of the sidewalk, so she lost her balance and fell into sharp fence. She says she was on her way to the… the supermarket, was it?”

“Mhm,” she nodded.

“Right. So you should consider finding one a little closer to home. I’m sorry, miss, but I’m on duty. I have to go now. Have a good night, folks.”

“Thank you, Mista’ Offica! Tell your wife Ms. Myra said hello!”

“I will, miss,” he said smiling as he left the room.

“Hollis?” I asked again after the officer had left. I was still furious with myself, incredibly so, but I could not understand why Ms. Myra was in Hollis, which was two towns over. And our supermarket, the one she had gone to hundreds of times before for the past fifteen years, was just three blocks away from our house.

“Just got a lil’ lost,” was all she could say.

***

After Jeopardy, Ms. Myra turned off the television, choosing to listen to the to distant shrill of police sirens and faint chatter of men on the street instead. “Darius, where Adonis went?” she asked again, in the same concerned tone she had before.

“College,” I reminded her.

“Oh, mhm…” She slowly reached for the bandaged, but stopped after catching my eyes. “So where Kiesha went then?

“Virginia.”

“Virginia!” she said, sitting up abruptly, implying, “what the hell is she doing there?”

“Calm down, Ms. Myra. She lives there with her family now.”

“Virginia?… Virginia…Oh, yes, I think I remember…” she whispered, as she reclined back into the armchair. Ms. Myra sat trying to make sense of a life that seemed to be going by without her knowledge or consent, but she couldn’t. As hard as she tried, as much as she wanted to.

***

The morning after the accident, I called the other four who all, after reprimanding me “for being a dumbass,” also found it strange that Ms. Myra would get lost going somewhere she was well familiar with. All of us except Elisha, a medical student at Temple. She was the first to suggest the possibility of the disease, and advised that I take her to the neurologist. Ms. Myra reluctantly agreed, though insisting she had “just gotten a ‘lil lost. Ain’t no big deal.” But after assessing her symptoms and analyzing her brain scans, the doctor confirmed that Ms. Myra did indeed, as Elisha predicted, have Alzheimer’s.

“Oldtimers? The hell is that?” she shouted at the doctor.

“Alzheimer’s disease, miss, is a progressive form of presenile dementia.”

“Excuse me?”

“It simply means you’re going to have trouble remembering things, more so than you normally would. This isn’t uncommon for people your age, miss.”

“But I’m only sixty-seven! Plus a lil’ extra…” The doctor was well aware that she was eighty-two, but thought it best not to aggravate her any further. Ms. Myra was upset because she didn’t want to believe that her memory was out of her control. But she herself knew it did explain why she often couldn’t find money she had put down; or recall the names of her close friends; or remember where her children were; or locate a nearby supermarket. “MMM..Mmm…I don’t got no oldtimers. I don’t! Tell him, Darius. I’m not losin’ my mind!”

I couldn’t answer.

***

Ms. Myra soon fell asleep. Her large, pronounced bosom slowly rose and fell. Her feet occupied one corner of the coffee table, beside a glass of water and an orange tinted medicine bottle. Her bandaged arm, with its loose, curling adhesive, hung from one side of the armchair.

I packed up my books, placed a blanket over her, turned off the light and went upstairs.

***

Ever since the accident, when I’m not at school, I stay with her throughout the day and until she falls asleep at night, just in case she wanders off again. I’m pretty limited to the house these days, and to be honest, it sometimes gets to me. But I know it shouldn’t. Besides, “boy, didn’ I teach you’ betta’ than that?” she would probably say.