Natalie

  

May 27^th 2028

 

When Mike called me at 10:30pm, I knew something was wrong.  When we were younger late night calls were not unusual. Now that we are both middle-aged and he is a husband and father, he’s much more likely to call mid-afternoon with an assortment of family members in the car.

 

I knew his mother, Natalie, had been in the hospital having a hard time with diverticulitis, so it wasn’t a surprise when he told me she had died. After years of heart trouble, the additional strain was too much.

 

I said the things you say when there really is nothing to say, I’m so sorry and I’m here if you need me, words like pennies dropped into a deep black well.

 

Hanging up, I thought about Natalie.  Mike was my 9th grade boyfriend when we were both 13 year old nerd kids at Stuyvesant, so I have known Natalie for three quarters of my life.  When we were young and pushing the boundaries, we avoided parents as much as possible, so I didn’t know her well then although I knew she considered me a good influence on her son.

 

That relationship did not last long-  I immersed myself in the queer world while he played chess and  handball.

 

By the time we made it through college in separate states, we were able to be friends across our very different lives- he was deep in the Wall Street lawyer life while I had gone pretty much the opposite way, into the constant financial struggle of the nonprofit world.

 

He was living in an apartment above his parents. Often when I visited, we would sit downstairs in his parents’ lovely duplex, chatting and eating the endless assortment of treats Natalie offered.

 

As a mother, she was a total contrast to my own, all softness and easy welcoming, while my own had sharp angles and wariness.  She had left her nursing career to be a stay home mother who doted on her only child, and filled their home with her own paintings.  Even when Mike was not around, for years if I found myself in Park Slope I would drop by, knowing they would be happy to see me.

 

When New Alt had fundraisers, they would show up with or without Mike, an elderly Jewish couple looking out of place under the disco ball at the Monster.  Natalie's brother was gay and died of AIDS, so she had a connection to the community.

 

His mother was not only a nurse before she had him, but also a breast cancer survivor, so in 2003, when she heard from Mike that I had a lump - which is especially terrifying when you come from a family where all the women get breast cancer - she swung into action.  She set me up with her own doctor, and she and Marty drove me to appointments and tests, with him waiting in the car while she came in with me.  After what turned out to be a very traumatic surgery, a lumpectomy done while I was awake with my eyes arms tied down like Jesus on the cross, a surgery so brutal that years later another doctor would ask me what country it was done in- they were both waiting in recovery. 

 

Then in 2015, when intense lower back pain was followed by my legs going haywire - feet numb, stumbling gait, lack of balance that had me falling all over the place - and the search for an explanation took months of various appointments, once again they showed up with Marty in the driver’s seat and Natalie sitting next to me in waiting rooms telling me about her young grandson.

 

When Mike married his second wife, he bought a house in Newark, and eventually moved his parents out there.  I had some doubts about that because they had such deep roots in Brooklyn, but the chance to be with their new granddaughter all the time made up for it.  And maybe I was the one who didn’t want them to leave Brooklyn, didn’t want to lose the space that had been a refuge for so long.

 

 I saw them infrequently after that, usually only when his Dad had a medical appointment in Brooklyn and they would stop by my house briefly with Mike, who had retired early, behind the wheel.