On Sunday, May 24, 2020, I meet Gram’s friend, Ralph.
Coronavirus deaths in the United States near 100,000. Over 350,000 deaths are reported worldwide. The New York Times fills the entire Sunday front page with death notices of 1,000 U.S. victims.
Sunday morning, over coffee, I read an example from my laptop screen to Gram: “Alan Lund, 81, Washington, a conductor with the most amazing ear.”
“Poor Alan Lund,” she says. “My Ralph is 81.”
I notice she calls him My Ralph.
After dinner every night Great Grandma Rose goes into the bedroom, behind a closed door, to talk on her phone with Ralph. When I ask about him, she says he is “just a friend” in a peculiarly end-of-conversation way. (Confession: I keep a secret from Gram too. She’s pretty conventional and I worry it will change how she sees me.)
I call her Gram, though she’s my great-grandmother on Mom’s side. Gram sits across from me in her old wing chair, which in our family we lovingly call her throne. I lugged that heavy chair up the front steps to my small, two-bedroom rental. She would not leave it at Shady Pines, her nickname for where she lives, a retirement home in Palo Alto. When the news reported COVID-19 spreading in retirement communities, I kidnapped Gram and her chair, stuffed my duffel bag with her clothes, her medicines, and a handful of her favorite family photos, and brought her to my house to protect her. We have been sheltering in place for 69 days. So far, we have not killed each other.
“Sophie, we need ice cream,” she says. Gram has maintained for years that ice cream is the key to longevity.
In my small living room Gram’s White Linen perfume permeates the air with its musky lavender smell, not cloyingly floral like some. This familiar aroma, something I have known all my twenty-three years, relaxes me. She wears her green sweatshirt with the white ducks across the front and it brings out the green in her hazel-green eyes. She has a drooping eyelid from aging that makes her right eye smaller than the left; it doesn’t interfere with her vision, but it gives her the friendly appearance of a slight wink when she smiles.
“We need ice cream,” she says again. “Mint chip.”
Gram repeats herself a lot, but I’m used to it. She has short term memory problems, will often forget what she’s had for breakfast or things I’ve just told her, but she remembers the past with the detail of a historian.
I drop a scoop of mint chip into her coffee mug. Mint chip is so Gram: the calming properties of peppermint with surprising bursts of chewy chocolate.
On June 15, 2020, Great Grandma Rose will be one hundred years old. Thankfully, Gram is in amazing shape—although she claims the number of artificial parts in her body exceeds her ability to count. She’s had both knees and both hips replaced, but she does use a walker for balance, and she needs help putting on her shoes. The walker has already required movement of furniture in my small living room, but I was happy to drag my two chairs and a table out of the way rather than risk her falling. I’ve been grateful I have wood floors instead of carpeting. For her special day, we had a celebration planned at Gamble Garden in Palo Alto. Family members had planned to travel from all over the United States for her party. Now, of course, travel is restricted, group gatherings prohibited, and the party has been cancelled.
I take a meditation breath and walk over to my front window. I never used to look out this window much, but lately I feel like a prisoner who craves the light. Overnight the dogwood tree, whose branches curl across the glass outside, has developed yellow flowers. Blooming trees, spring in Palo Alto. Spring does not know there is a virus. Behind me I hear the soft sound of snoring, with that slight wheeze I recognize as normal. The ice cream is gone, and Gram has fallen asleep in her chair.
Last night, two different neighbors had their cars broken into and searched for cash. Before Covid I didn’t know many neighbors. I’m a keep-to-myself kind of person. (Confession: I’m painfully shy around strangers.) Once Gram joined me, and I took her out to exercise with her walker, she encouraged stopping, waving, talking at a safe distance, and one by one we met the neighbors. Gram isn’t shy about her age and most people haven’t met anyone almost one hundred. These neighbors emailed us about the break-ins. One neighbor kept a twenty and some coins in the glove compartment and the money (though nothing else) was taken. It turned out these neighbors did not lock their cars (I always do), but the idea of someone going up and down the street “testing” for open cars at 3 a.m. looking for money was unsettling and sad. I hated to think of anyone that desperate.
By the end of April, the U.S. economy lost 20.5 million jobs. They say it’s the largest and most sudden decline since the government began tracking job data in 1939. I work as a technical assistant at the local gym and I’ve been furloughed indefinitely. Gram worked hard raising kids and keeping house. When my great-grandfather died, she took the life insurance money and laddered it in safe and reliable CDs. Without Gram’s financial help, I could be out there too, checking unlocked cars for cash.
Sunday afternoon, I see a tall—very tall—Black man with a white beard, wearing a tank top, shorts and a Warriors cap standing outside on the sidewalk in front of my house, staring, some might say loitering. My thoughts go immediately to the car burglaries. (Confession: I am deeply ashamed of this reaction.) Gram has a look of combined pleasure and panic. Later she explains that she is “tickled pink” that Ralph has walked over from Shady Pines, and, at the same time, “alarmed” over the risk of neighbors calling the police.
In one of his former lives, Ralph was an African prince who left his country to get educated at Harvard. He moved to California, became a trial attorney, then a Professor at the Santa Clara School of Law, and, after he retired, a writer of murder mysteries. His pen name is Mazy Mitchell. I’ve read a few of her—I mean his—books on summer vacations. I am thrilled to meet Mazy Mitchell, who doesn’t look at all like her dust cover photo.
It’s racist to admit that I expect Ralph to be a white man, but I don’t remember Gram ever talking about any Black friends. I realize there are interesting things I don’t know about Gram. (Confession: I begin to hope that Gram might accept my secret more than I thought.) Later she tells me she loved him the first moment she heard his voice. She hates loud noises, has sensitive ears. Loud sounds cause a shock to her nervous system. She says Ralph has a soft, whispery voice that makes you lean in, pay attention, listen.
Waving out the window at him, Gram says, “Help! Quick! Get my walker. If we go outside, and talk to him, it will be clear to the neighbors he’s here to visit us.”
I hear the police siren as I’m walking out the front door carrying the walker. Gram struggles out behind me holding on to the front steps’ handrail. I don’t know which neighbor called them, but I have my suspicions.
As the police car rolls up, Ralph puts his hands up expecting the worst. He’s leaning forward, getting ready to fall on his knees. I guess he’s had this experience before.
All I know is that this is the man who has been keeping my Gram happy during the pandemic. So before the door on the police car opens, before Ralph can actually kneel, before I can think about the fact that I forgot to put on my mask, that I’m supposed to keep a safe social distance of six feet—before any of that—I drop the walker and I race toward him.
I run up to Ralph and I hug him.
I’m pretty tall but I have to stand on my toes. He smells like fresh rainwater with a hint of popcorn. I knock off his cap in my enthusiasm. When he looks at me, he has wrinkles around his eyes that make them look like they are part of a permanent smile.
It is obvious to any idiot that I’m not hugging the burglar they expect, and these police officers are nice people. When a man and a woman get out of the police car, Gram has already started her charm on them, waving as she rolls her walker down the front walk. By the time they leave we know all about them. Joe Brown has four kids. His wife is a nurse, a pandemic hero he calls her. Amara Mohan is single, my age, just started on the force, one of only two women. After meeting a few minutes (physical distance restored), thanks to Gram they know all about us too, including Ralph’s history as a mystery writer.
Before Ralph leaves, he throws a farewell kiss toward Gram. She’s so short her head must come only to his waist. They are distancing (is that a verb now?) so I can’t tell for sure.
Why didn’t Gram tell me about Ralph sooner? Why was she so secretive?
“It’s not that he’s a Black man,” she says, “it’s that he’s nineteen years younger. Robbing the cradle at one hundred.” She laughs, making a joke of it. Then she says something beautiful: “Love at one hundred has transformed me, Sophie. Like a burst of major chords can change the nature of a song.”
Love. I’ve never known love like that. I’m thinking about Amara Mohan. She has a beauty mark on her throat that moves when she speaks.
(Confession: I asked Amara for her phone number.)
That evening, Gram says we are allowed to have a medicinal glass of wine with our ice cream because Dr. Fauci from the NIH says alcohol is useful before and after White House corona virus briefings.
Two scoops later, I open up to Gram that I like to have sex with women. She says she guessed that a long time ago. She’s glad I’m ready to talk about it.
(Confession: I am so relieved I begin to cry.)
“Sophie,” Gram says, “there are many kinds of love in this world, but my love for you— consider it forever.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Flash fiction, creative nonfiction and longer stories by Jeanne Althouse have appeared in numerous literary journals. She was a finalist in the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction contest. Her story, “Goran Holds his Breath” was nominated by Shenandoah for the Pushcart Prize. A collection of her flash fiction, “Boys in the Bank,” was published by Red Bird Chapbooks. She dedicates this story to Edna Mae Nelson Carlson, mother of Sharlene Carlson, who claimed strawberry ice cream daily helped her live to be 103.