Michael Copperman
My eighty-three year old neighbor Suzanne got her driveway tarred this morning, an event in our sleepy suburb of Lansing, Michigan. She accidentally texted me about it instead of her eighty-five year old boyfriend Dick, who comes by once a week in his fresh-washed Chevy Silverado to mow the lawn. He wears a hunting cap, coveralls and heavy work boots, and rides his green John Deere at a real clip, bouncing over the dogwood roots like a rodeo cowboy, though he’s “well past any funny business now.”
Suzanne said this of Dick, apropos of nothing, with regret and something like longing in the living room of her house that was built by the same builder in the same year as ours, though her kitchen is where my living room is and vice versa. I was over to her place to retrieve our cat yet again, who invites himself in if the door is open for even a few seconds and then hides under her bed, emerging to attack her feet and frighten her half to death. Her living room is full of crystal figurines laid on white shelves: little crystal dogs, birds, lions and tigers, charismatic megafauna of the mid-Michigan elderly domestic. My wife Mashal would love these tchotchkes, so I have done my best to keep her from occasion to see them, for fear that her enthusiasm will lead Suzanne to an act of spontaneous generosity that might populate my reversed living room with their invasive species.
Suzanne is the sort of American who flies the American flag atop a white pole, with the Michigan flag underneath, and decorates the front of her house for Easter and Christmas, but not for Halloween. I worry that we worry her, with our home-invasion cat and our flagless house that we decorate for Halloween, but not for Easter and Christmas. She has been here since the 70s and says the neighborhood has changed, but she’s discreet enough not to tell us that we, the only non-white folks on the block, are part of the change she speaks of. She’s a grandma, but not one too stuck in her ways—last spring she came back from an Arizona visit to see her daughter and grandchildren with her hair dyed neon pink and put up in a fresh perm. Of the two workers who tarred her driveway this morning, she wrote to me instead of Dick:
“The two women are not even masculine, they are sharp, isn’t that something? I bet it didn’t take them a half an hour. They are done and on their way, they put cones at the end of my driveway. They’ll be back tomorrow for them.”
I imagine many things are something for Suzanne: women with hardhats who keep their nails painted purple beneath their work-gloves, a Black man as president, the shirtless Asian man next door who mows his lawn in jean shorts, muscles rippling as he jogs and pushes and grunts, while his lavender bikini-clad wife suns her brown self on a chaise lounge chair right there in front of God and the neighborhood. Suzanne texted me this when she realized what she’d sent:
“Sorry, not all that meant for you.”
I appreciate the implication that some part of it was meant for me—the sharpness of the working women, their speed and diligence, the imminently absent cones. She’s likely glad her texts about my mowing style or my wife’s public lounging didn’t go to me instead of Dick. I must admit, I do admire Dick for his diligent mowing, for his devotions despite his equipment having been retired. It is something how we change and so does the world, in ways we never imagined we could accept.
#
Michael Copperman’s prose has appeared in The Oxford-American, Guernica, The Sun, Creative Nonfiction (3x), Boston Review, Salon, Gulf Coast, Triquarterly, Kenyon Review and Copper Nickel, among many others, and has won awards and garnered fellowships from the Munster Literature Center, Breadloaf Writers Conference, Oregon Literary Arts, and the Oregon Arts Commission. His memoir TEACHER: Two Years in the Mississippi Delta (University Press of Mississippi 2017), about the rural black public schools of the Mississippi Delta, was a finalist for the 2018 Oregon Book Award in CNF.