Night Gazing

1972.  I am 15 years old.

I wear cheap thin flannel pajamas and a light blue chenille robe, and I slump half-asleep in a curved burnt-orange chair.  This swivel chair is off-balance (too much twirling in it by us kids) and it’s upholstered in worn plush.  Over my head, a heavy gilt plaster frame holds a knock-off reproduction of a Dutch Masters painting.  The picture is of an urn full of flowers with round tops like marigolds, but fancier.  I look out the window at the driveway, where a rotating beacon turns slowly in the darkness. throwing bright light (red, white, red, white) from the roof of an ambulance.

I am alone in the living room.  In the back bedroom, my parents and the medics are murmuring.  My youngest sister’s illness has taken another bad turn, in the middle of the night, again.

My mother, a woman of many fears, needs me to sit up in the front room while she and my father, in their car, follow the ambulance to Children’s Hospital.  I don’t know if my middle sister, a heavy sleeper, is aware that there is a medical emergency going on in the bedroom she shares with Joanne.

Mom is worried that while her two healthy daughters sleep, the furnace or the kitchen stove will leak gas fumes and smother us, or that a bad man will know that two innocents are unguarded and he will break in and get us.  Or perhaps, Mom’s anxious mind tells her, the people who once stole her purse from the bowling alley in the Twin-Aire shopping center will try to use Mom’s own house keys to get in.  The locks have been changed for years, true, but you never know with people.  So Mom has roused me from my rumpled bed and told me to sit up in the living room and keep an eye on the house and my middle sister.

 When I am shaken awake, I don’t whine or resist outwardly, but I am slow to come to consciousness and even slower to get up and put on my robe and move out of my bedroom toward the orange chair. I don’t want to sit up at 3 a.m. and gaze out the picture window into the darkness.  I hardly feel up to the responsibility of tenth grade, with its P.E. requirements and Algebra II, and now I am supposed to do things that would be hard for an adult?

Now, slumped and mildly sullen, I turn in the swivel chair a bit because my mother is coming down the hall.  She is in the same slightly-creased clothing as yesterday because she sat up all night at my sister’s bedside.  My mother pushes her unbrushed hair away from her forehead, pulls out a bobby pin, and re-inserts it. Then she gives me her serious look, full eye contact and everything.  “All right now, I need you to be the big girl."

She doesn’t say to be "a big girl,” as in the Four Seasons’ “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” but instead to be “the big girl,” which is an Appalachian concept.  “Big girl” means eldest daughter, deputized to act as surrogate parent for younger siblings.

I nod, murmur “Okay,” and sit up a little more in the orange plush chair.

My mother looks at the long television console with the black-mesh speakers covering each of the record player and radio components.  “Whyn’t you turn this radio on?  That’ll help you stay awake.  You could go in the kitchen and get you a Pepsi.”

“Maybe,” I say, though we both know that I don’t like cola.  I do get up and go to the wood-grain console, which has the gray-green blank television screen in the center, the record player on the left, and the AM/FM radio on the right side.  I lift the heavy wooden lid over the radio control panel, and click the knob into the "On" position. There are sounds of  static and murmuring announcer voices and blips of music as I tune in the Top 40 station. WIBC has had “Don’t Pull Your Love Out On Me, Baby” by Hamilton, Joe Frank, & Reynolds in heavy rotation, and in fact that very song is playing now:  “…then I think that maybe I’ll just lay me down, cry for a hundred years…”

The ambulance gurney with my twelve-year-old sister on it comes rattling down the hallway, and then the medics ease it out past the storm door and then down to the driveway where the ambulance beacon flashes red, white, red, white.  My father silently follows the gurney, without glancing my way.  My mother, now with her worn leather purse over her arm, takes up the rear.  She stops at the door and fishes the car keys out of her purse.

On the radio, Hamilton, Joe Frank, & Reynolds sing “you know you’ll break my heart when I watch you close that door, ‘cause I know I won’t see you anymore…”

Mom gives me another serious look.  “Be careful with the stove,” she says, as she always does when she leaves me in charge.

“All right,” I say.

The radio changes the mood in the room as “Don’t Pull Your Love Out On Me Baby” fades out and is replaced by Anne Murray’s “Snowbird”:  “Beneath its snowy mantle cold and clean, the unborn grass lies waiting for its coat to turn to green…”

“I’m going to lock this door good,” says my mother.

“Okay,” I say, and Mom stands at the door, looking at me, sitting in the chair under the painting of the flowers.  Anne Murray's voice fills the silence:  “. . .when I was young my heart was young then, too. Anything that it would tell me, that’s the thing that I would do.”

“You’re a help to me,” says Mom.

I nod,

Outside, the ambulance pulls out of the gravel driveway onto the blacktop road. without the blare of the siren but with the sweeping roof light flashing red, white, red, white.  Then my mother goes out the front door and down to the driveway and gets into the old Chevy.  The car door slams, and the Impala engine starts with a grinding bent-flywheel sound, and the engine roars and rattles. I hear the tires crunch backward along the pea gravel and the night is quiet again as the old car disappears down the road.

I am alone listening to Anne Murray.sing “So, little snowbird, take me with you when you go, to that land of gentle breezes where the peaceful waters flow,” as my eyes adjust to the dark shadows of the treeline across the quiet road.