riotheclown

Prompt: Surrender

 Brigits Flame, Just for fun, wk 4 July, 2011
Title: My friend Suk (pronounced Sook)
Author: urb-banal
word Count: 922
Genre: non-fiction

My friend Suk (Sook) has taken me to the seniors swim twice now. 

She is retired like me and like me she is looking after her mother. “It’s the Chinese way and I am the only daughter!” She has a way of saying “dawww…ta” that sounds plaintive and very sad, like she confessing simultaneously a crime and a punishment. I get this. There is a lot about her I get. 

I have known her for a long time. When we met our kids were teenagers and we were both greatly over worked. She was working in her family’s restaurant and I was a cashier at a big box store. We both had dreams of doing something else. 

Her real name is Jackie Mackenzie* and she has a thick Scottish brogue to go with it, but she is Chinese by decent, which is where the “Suk” comes in. We met in a Business English class. She was going by her Chinese name so she could avoid the surprise on the teacher’s face when she would look up from her student list and see someone who didn’t look like a typical Scottish person. It might have been to soften the teacher’s attitude when marking too. “It’s only fair, being Chinese is used against me, right?”

She offered to take me shopping. I didn’t have a car and she had a keen sense of indebtedness to the environment. She told me, “I don’t feel so guilty about driving around polluting if I give people rides.” I learned to shop like I was a member of SWAT on a mission, descending on the aisles with purpose and precision. She never had spare time. What became a weekly excursion didn’t leave a lot of time for sharing. The warm and woolly way that rich women friends on television share never happened.  Still, events that marked us were occasionally thrown out as bits of information. Gradually we came to appreciate what we had in common.

When I got cancer I told Suk I would prefer it if she let me call her when I felt up to it. That was almost ten years ago. We have spoken on the phone many times of course and she has dropped by on occasion. She goes for a walk every day (she gets up at 5:00am) but my arthritis is bad so I prefer to cycle, and I no longer have a reason to get up so early so I ride in the evening. She has a bike but doesn’t like to ride and in the evening her husband is home and they watch television together. I have lots of time to shop these days and so I don’t need a ride. I get what I need when I need it. Long and short: in a friendship that is mostly practical we no longer have as many reasons to see each other.

Suk offered to take me swimming early one morning after the heat wave had been going on for so long I was feeling weak from lack of activity. She knew about Sally. She had been there when I got the call telling me she had killed herself.

The heat wave had started on the day of Sally’s funeral. Outside the funeral parlor there was a crowd of people all standing around smoking. I caught of whiff of marijuana. The smell took me to a time when I moved through my days like a slow moving train taking in the scenery. There was music in my life then. There was art and poetry. There were friends; the on-going “kitchen talks” and nights blending into mornings. There was an understanding that we were intrinsically important. There was everything that came before we found out why and why not.

I had several days when I would wear my grief like armor and fall into tears when I would realize I had forgotten for a while that my friend was dead. The aberration in the weather seemed oddly appropriate. The oppressive heat said that there was no room for happiness.

When she called I said yes, for the first time, to going to the seniors swim. They keep the water fairly warm and the space air-conditioned. It was a relief from the fetid humidity outside: It's everything that an old lady wants and needs.

I put on my swim suit, struggling to pull it over the girth that has grown dramatically over the years and walked out to the pool. Suk was greeted enthusiastically by everyone as she entered the pool. “This is my friend, it’s her first time, this is…” It seemed I was to be introduced to everyone. Suk filled me in with asides, “That’s Jimmy, he’s a funny guy, that’s Martha, she’s recovering from knee surgery, oh and they are the Germans, they are all friends, they like to keep fit. There are lots of Chinese people here…”

After what I hoped was a polite amount of time I left the group and I made my way to the kiddies’ section. It was empty. I floated.  I surrendered my weight to weightless, my meaning to meaninglessness, and my loss to what could not be lost. I felt relief. I felt released.

Driving home I said to Suk, “I really appreciate you taking me. Thank you.”

If you will indulge me a bit here I will try to spell out the way she sounds.

“Oh, tha’s alrigh’, I tha maybe yewh migh’ need to get ow a bit… yewh knoe…”

Kindness can be like a star in an endless night.