Karuna
Charles Chaim Wax
I saw Mary yesterday. Love is so strange, as one of my students said - unusual, uncommon, exceptional, deviant, off-center, remarkable, exotic, screwy - yet all these single words, somehow, don’t completely re-create the emotion. Mary loves me, I can tell, in her own way, in the way a seventy-four year old woman loves a forty-five year old man.
It happened like this. As soon as she saw me come through the door into the lobby of our building, she smiled. I smiled.
“Steve, do you know how to work the dryer?” she asked.
“I think so.”
“They changed the price to sixty cents.”
“Oh,” I gasped.
Then her voice changed - so soft, seductive (?), yearning, “Can you help me?”
I stared at her. The face once must have been lovely but now I could only see the paleness, the immense creases, the wrinkles, the crevices, the hollow cheeks, the bent shoulders, the unsteady hobble. My heart, my heart . . . so . . . so all the young beautiful women in my classes . . . this . . . this . . . without doubt . . . but I would never live to see this thing because by the time each would revolve into such age I would be long, long in my coffin. THERE . . . I THOUGHT IT. That’s why I didn’t like to see Mary and I hated myself for not liking to see her. I gave her so much pleasure. I always made sure to say, “Oh, I adore those green earrings you’re wearing today.” Or, “You look so charming with the red lipstick.” Little chit-chats which re-created a bit of delight for her - the memory of possibility when now little existed but to try and go to the supermarket. That was the big event of her day. She would say, “I have to go out. Who can stay in the house the whole day? Going is not so bad but coming home . . . ahh.” Mary had arthritis. The bones in her joints screeched when she bent her knees to take a step.
I followed her into the laundry room. Another old woman was waiting for me.
Mary smiled, “I brought Steve to rescue us.”
Both women were short. I looked down at the tops of their heads. Mary had thin gray hair with patches of baldness here and there. The other woman wore a plastic blonde wig. Her face was puffy but not as wrinkled as Mary’s.
I walked to the dryer and studied the coin mechanism. The woman wearing the blonde wig gave me two quarters and one dime. “Ah,” I sighed. “It goes like this. In the left side you put one quarter on top of the other and the dime goes just to the right.” I plopped the coins in and pushed the small metal arm. The coins engaged the starting mechanism and the dryer started.
Mary exclaimed, “Such a man.”
Then they both looked at each other. There was an awkward silence but it lasted only seconds.
The woman with the blonde wig sighed, “It takes a man.” I was not clear what the word “It” referred to. Takes a man to do what? I didn’t ask.
Mary murmured, “I’ll walk you to the elevator, Steve.”
“Thank you so much.” She smiled when I said that.
As we slowly walked she went on, “I do a lot for her - shopping, clean a little, but I can’t do it all.” Then she reached out and caressed my arm with her thin twisted fingers and giggled, “My hero.”
Her voice like a little girl who had eaten too many cookies in secret and been found out. The sound, if I had not seen the wrinkled face from which it cam - just like a child, six, seven, no more - the same. Filled with joy. Because of me?
