A Better Place

Published in American Writers Review, 2023.

Ally gently opened Mrs. Bunker’s front door. The door was never locked in case Mrs. Bunker needed to make a fast exit. “Hello Mrs. Bunker!” Ally cried out. “It’s Tuesday and I’m here. It’s me! Ally-Allison!”

Ally waited at the doorway, preferring to enter with permission because startling the frail Mrs. Bunker could cause a heart attack or other calamitous repercussion. Then she heard labored gurgling from the condo’s back forty where the bedroom, was and she dropped her cleaning supplies and she ran, sandy sneakers and all, across the cream-colored rug. And there was Mrs. Bunker: flat on her back, a whale of a woman contentedly snoring away. 

“Mrs. Bunker,” Ally said a little louder. A ghoul on TV was doing the death rattle again and again but on previous occasions messing with the volume cause Mrs. Bunker to shoot upright, as if a tight spring had been sprung.

On the floor next to the bed was her junky Dollar Store purse, open wide, her wallet of credit cards clearly visible. Anyone could tiptoe in and rob the poor woman blind. Sometimes Mrs. Bunker was awake when Ally made her entrance. She’d wait for special instructions while Mrs. Bunker would be singing along (or trying to) to the religious shows. The preachers praying, singing, lecturing, chastising: It’s like a re-run of my marriage, she jokingly once told Ally, and how could Ally not love the elderly woman? Then Mrs. Bunker would motion with her hand – come on Ally-Allison. Ally would sing along, but not for long because she had work to do.

“You-hoo, Mrs. Bunker! It’s Tuesday. Laundry day!”

The woman snorted. Then she licked her lips. Mrs. Bunker was nearly 90. Ally did not believe she herself would live that long, and based on her experiences at Ocean Side, she had little desire to. Still, Mrs. Bunker’s son, Fred, Venmoed her pay, without fail every Friday. 

Ally preferred Mrs. Bunker to other clients whose cultural biases wrapped around their brain like a layer of plastic wrap that could suddenly shrink and tighten. It was invisible to them but if Ally reached out, she felt it in her gut. Was it worth the bad feelings and potential job losses to enlighten them? That was being judgmental, wasn’t it? Imposing her views on them?

Ally was biracial and depending on the light, and what people knew, she could be either Black or White. She appreciated both sides’ positions. Her mom would say: Damned if you do and damned if you don’t, Ally. It’s often a no-win. Every situation required an evaluation and possibly a new approach because you’re not this, and you’re not that. 

“Mrs. Bunker. I need to get you up so I can change the sheets.” Ally shook the old woman’s shoulder a little and her tiny eyes peeked through her flesh.

“Hello Ally-Allison.” She sang it like a song, and it made her smile. “Ally-Allison!”

Ally took hold of Mrs. Bunker’s hands and pulled her up and a wave of unwashed body odor entered the room’s already warm air and mixed with the existing currents of stale coffee,  bagels and sweet pungent medications (many bought on-line), the whole mess churning and swirling. The old woman could use a hot long shower with a fragrant soap. Ally suspected the nurse who supposedly came in twice-a-week to take Mrs. Bunker’s vitals and fill her pill box (a battle Mrs. Bunker complained about) was neglecting other crucial duties.

“Do you mind if I open the blinds?”

“Open the blinders, but not too much.”

Ally depressed the button on the wall and the hurricane blinds groaned alive, it sounded like a slow-moving train, sliding north revealing a landscape of wild grapes and beyond that, the clear blue Atlantic Ocean. She opened the sliding glass door an inch – too much could be dangerous to Mrs. Bunker’s delicate disposition – then slowly walked Mrs. Bunker to the kitchen/dining room table and prepared her coffee and bagel.

Next to the coffee machine was an ancient knickknack of a black woman. Mrs. Bunker had knickknacks everywhere so it wasn’t surprising from her generation that there would be something offensive; it wasn’t as though she had a whole China cabinet of busty bobbing black women with eyes that went sideways and earrings danced erotically every time you breathed on it. Thank goodness, she thought, White people finally got rid of black lawn jockeys. Jackos. Her White grandmother had had one. Black people had white symbols too, but they had them in different ways. She remembered her mother searching all over the state for a Black baby doll. Ally always shoved the knickknack behind a shelf of old cookbooks, but it kept reappearing, as if the thing itself required a fuller recognition before disappearing forever.   

“Can you turn on the TV, Ally-Allison?”

Ally turned on the TV. It sat like royalty on the kitchen counter aimed at Mrs. Bunker’s favorite chair. This way she could watch what she called her news show. Then Ally turned on the TV in the living room and the one in the Grandma Cave where Mrs. Bunker played games on her computer and made irresponsible purchases from scam websites. Before clicking she was supposed to request Ally’s opinion but Mrs. Bunker either forgot or just ignored Fred’s rules. Thoughtful and reflective were not Mrs. Bunker’s strong points, yet being reactive and filter-less gave her a certain charm: Ally never knew what would come out of the nonagenarian’s mouth.

Ally stripped the bed and felt the towels (not one used!) and gathered up the dirty laundry and filled the washer. The washing machine was probably 35 years-old, same age as Ally, and the dial was broken so you had to feel-guess where the start was. Ally missed a greasy dishrag in the sink, but it was so heavy with grease and food tidbits that it would have contaminated the other laundry. If she tossed it out, Mrs. Bunker would doubtlessly inquire about its whereabouts.

“How do you think I got to be so rich, Ally-Allison?” Mrs. Bunker often said with her characteristic laugh. “I’m frugal!”

Ally never mentioned the fridge’s French fries rigor mortising in take-out containers, or the spaghetti sublimating into glue. And Fred had not told his mother how much he was paying Ally because in Mrs. Bunker’s World, you paid for things, not services. And there were lots of things in the condo: upholstered couches in flowered patterns, several glassed-in China cabinets bursting with archaic religious statues. Passed down from generation to generation. Fancy dishes that not one single human being had ever eaten from.

She washed the rag out as best she could then returned to the bedroom to prepare it for vacuuming. There were a dozen or so prescription medicines on the small table beside the bed, some on the floor, all in various states of repose: this lid off, this bottle on its side, this one on its head, some over to the night side, some to the day side, demarcated by a line only visible to its inventor. This was Mrs. Bunker’s organizational method. Ally had been warned not to touch anything; Mrs. Bunker’s meds were carefully calibrated by an interwoven web of doctors and a tiny mistake in her regimen could be fatal.

Ally vacuumed as much of the bedroom rug as she could get to, then she cleaned the bathroom. Next was the Granny Cave. She picked up all the scribbled, barely legible notes on paper scraps and glossy newsprint that supposedly documented Mrs. Bunker’s purchases and that prove to Fred she was not irresponsible. Those went into an ornate glass bowl on an end table. She gathered coffee cups, potato chip bags, frozen food tins and forks. When the Granny Cave was clean, she had Mrs. Bunker sit there in a wide upholstered chair about six feet from a large-screen TV. Ally closed the door so as not to disturb Mrs. Bunker and continued vacuuming in the spacious living room.

At 11 Ally made lunch and that was another nice perk: Fred paid her for the half hour of eating and chatting with Mrs. Bunker. Her other job, teaching sociology courses like Communities Together or the Sneaky Fascism barely paid minimum wage, although the discussions and personal interaction stimulated her mind. She made almost three times as much at Mrs. Bunker’s. She was a couple thousand dollars short of her goal to save $15,000, then she’d return to the sleepy college town in the Finger Lakes and rent her Mom’s basement and have her baby, a planned baby. Ally had just entered into her second trimester.

At 11:30 Ally entered the Granny Cave with a tray of salad, bowls of split pea soup and glasses of cold water. A few feet from Mrs. Bunker she set up a small folding table and chair. Sometimes when eating lunch and watching TV, Ally felt as if she were with her own mother. There was that mutual admiration and satisfaction — love she would call it — that developed between only women, and over time. Ally sipped her soup: rich thick split pea soup with lots of ham, expensive soup that she ate only when she worked at Ocean Side. Mrs. Bunker was enough of a people-person to understand that Ally was not fond of Docx News (the Docx apparently in reference to documentary, but in reality (such a term!) the program was entertainment provocation) so they always watched either Turner Classics or Documentaries USA. Today they were watching Mississippi:1961 to 1964.

“Do you remember that, Mrs. Bunker?”

“I do. War on Poverty and all that.”

The two of them stared at the TV, black and white photos of unpainted shacks and the Black people that inhabited them, and looks of despair on the adults’ faces.

“The Bible says: The poor will always be with us. Someone has to be poor.”

Ally decided not to respond to that comment.

“There was the Civil Rights Movement too,” Mrs. Bunker said. “JFK. Robert too, both of them shot down in the prime of their lives. And they were Catholic. JFK—first Catholic president. Good Christian men.” Mrs. Bunker had been a Catholic, but for the past couple of generations, she’d morphed into a free-singing Christian. She believed in Jesus and the teachings of Jesus and often said: Whatever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me. Ally thought that was a good way to approach life.

“Who else, Mrs. Bunker?” Ally said, prodding her.

“Who else what?”

“Who else was assassinated?”

“Let me think.” With her trembling hand, Mrs. Bunker spooned some soup into her mouth. “There was Martin Luther. Martin Luther King, Ally-Allison!”

“Right.” The churning in Ally’s stomach stopped, and she could enjoy her lunch again.

“Look!” Mrs. Bunker said suddenly, her shaking finger pointing at the television screen. “There he is!”

“Who?

“Right there!”

“Where?”

“Can’t you see, Ally-Allison? You need glasses? Martin Luther King. That Black man.”

“Mrs. Bunker, there’s no Martin Luther King on the screen. MLK had a moustache. He didn’t wear glasses. That man is Malcom X.”

Mrs. Bunker frowned, then she said: “That’s a strange name.”

Ally briefly summarized the importance of Malcolm X to the Civil Rights Movement and told her about Freedom Summer, June 1964, and mentioned the murders of Chaney, Goodmen and Schwerner, a story that Mrs. Bunker said she had never heard about. She admitted that the schools never talked about Black people, except as slaves.

“But that doesn’t happen anymore,” Mrs. Bunker said. “The government says everyone is equal, and Black people got all their rights in the 60s. We shop at the same grocery stores. Everyone goes to school together. And they learn about the American Way of Life together.”

“Learn what together?”

“You know, how the world works. Look Ally-Allison, everybody got civil rights after 1965. That’s what civil rights mean. Civil – ordinary people, like you and me, have rights. Rights are what’s due to a person. Right to a job, right to own a house. To marry. To vote. You weren’t even alive then, Ally-Allison, you know, when the Blacks got the right to vote.”

“It’s more complex, just because they got the right, didn’t mean we could use it.”

“What do you mean, we?”

“I meant Black people.” What to say to Mrs. Bunker was a dance and a tricky balance. “Other people threw obstacles in the way of Black voting: there were poll taxes, transportation, and accessibility problems. Intimation, Mrs. Bunker. A lot of it still exists today, especially here, Mrs. Bunker, in Florida.” She couldn’t wait to leave Florida.

“Ally-Allison, understand that there are people who will always complain, because things don’t go exactly their way,” Mrs. Bunker said. “I know. I was brought up in a different time, when people had to take the good with the bad. This victim mentality doesn’t help. If people had religion, they’d be better off. Are you religious, Ally-Allison?”

Mrs. Bunker asked Ally this question regularly and she always gave her the same answer: “I am spiritual.”

Mrs. Bunker didn’t know what to make of that response, so she said: “I pray along with the Black people on TV. I donate to them. That says who I am, but I don’t understand their complaints. They have all the rights that we have, and now, they seem to want this special treatment, as if something is owed to them.”

Ally looked at Mrs. Bunker, the old woman’s drawn face, unwashed hair, her sad eyes but it was her swollen legs that made her feel sorry for this woman and others like her. Ally had been concerned enough to spend hours talking with her doctors and explaining in great detail their recommendations to Mrs. Bunker and how to implement them. It didn’t seem to make any difference.

They continued to watch Mississippi:1961-1964 and eat their lunch, Mrs. Bunker in a mild coma, apparently tired out from all this effort of thinking.

“I don’t have a lot of time left,” Mrs. Bunker suddenly said. “Soon I’ll be going to that better place.”

“I see,” Ally said, waiting for Mrs. Bunker to say more, but she did not. She said as much as she could, and as much as she wanted to.

Mrs. Bunker did not do even the minimal exercise her doctors recommended which was walking up and down the outside hallway twice-a-day with her walker. To exercise her body or mind seemed to claim an enormous amount of energy, and the machine of Mrs. Bunker was running out of fuel. It made Ally want to leave the condo and run along the beach as fast as she could, run miles and miles because she never wanted her mind to be old, to stop growing and producing those new brain cells. She never wanted her mind to disregard any possibility for joy and happiness; she wanted space to love and to think through problems, especially now because of this life inside of her, already breathing and syncing to her mind.

⁂

When Ally left the condo that afternoon she kidnapped the Black bobbing woman, slipping her gently into her backpack, thinking this is the last time. No more hiding. And if Mrs. Bunker asked about the Black woman, she would tell her she was in a better place, and the elderly woman might think about what happened, but not for long, and in the end, she would accept it.