Can't Wait to Get to Heaven Page 2

  The Eyewitness

  8:02 AM

  Earlier, at exactly 8:02 AM, Tot Whooten, a thin and wiry redhead who always wore pale blue eye shadow, even though it had been out of style since the seventies, had been on her way to work at the beauty shop because her client Beverly Cortwright was coming in for a dye job today, and she needed to get to the shop a little early and do some mixing. As she walked by Elner Shimfissle’s house, she just happened to look up, in time to see her neighbor topple backward off an eight-foot ladder, with what looked like a hundred wasps buzzing all around her and following her right down to the ground. After poor Elner landed with a thud, Tot yelled at her, “Don’t move, Elner!” and ran up her other neighbor’s front porch steps, screaming at the top of her lungs, “Ruby! Ruby! Get out here quick! Elner’s fallen out of the tree again!” Ruby Robinson, a diminutive woman of about five-foot-one, in clear bifocals that made her eyes look twice as big, was having her breakfast, but the instant she heard Tot, she jumped up, grabbed her small black leather doctor’s bag from the hall table, and ran as fast as she could. By the time the two of them reached the side yard, about twenty angry and upset wasps were still flying all around the tree, and Elner Shimfissle was lying on the ground, unconscious. Ruby immediately reached in her bag, pulled out the smelling salts, and snapped it under Elner’s nose, while Tot relayed what she had just witnessed to the other neighbors, who had started to come out of their houses and gather around the fig tree. “I was headed off to work,” she said, “when I heard this loud buzzing noise…buzz…buzz…buzzzzz, so I looked up, and saw Elner hurl herself backward off the top of the ladder, and then…Whamo! Bang! She hit the ground, and it’s a good thing she’s so bottom heavy, because when she fell, she didn’t flip or anything; just went straight down like a ton of bricks.” Ruby quickly popped another smelling salts under Elner’s nose, but still she did not come around. Never taking her eyes off of her patient for a second, Ruby suddenly started barking orders. “Somebody call an ambulance! Merle, bring me a couple of blankets. Tot, go call Norma and tell her what’s happened.” Ruby, who at one time had been head nurse at a major hospital, knew how to give orders, and everybody scattered and did exactly what she said.

  Norma Hits the Road

  8:33 AM

  The second she hung up with Macky, Norma ran to the kitchen again and threw cold water in her face, then flew through the house frantically gathering up her purse, Aunt Elner’s insurance papers and Medicaid information, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and anything else she thought her aunt would need for the hospital. Norma had been waiting for years for something like this to happen, and now that it had, she was glad she’d had the foresight to plan for it. Ten years ago she had prepared a file marked HOSPITAL EMERGENCY, AUNT ELNER.

  She also had an earthquake kit in the garage, where she kept bottled water, matches, six cans of Del Monte chili, a small supply of her hormones, thyroid medicine, aspirin, a jar of Merle Norman cold cream, and fingernail polish remover and an extra pair of earrings. Although it was not very likely that an earthquake would hit Elmwood Springs, Missouri, she felt it was better to be safe than sorry.

  After Norma had gathered all the things for Aunt Elner, she ran out of the house and yelled to a woman in the yard next door, “I’m on my way to the hospital, my aunt’s fallen out of a tree again,” and jumped in the car and took off. The woman, who did not know Norma very well, stood there and watched her leave, wondering what in the world Norma’s aunt was doing up in a tree. After Norma rounded the steep corner and steered out of the complex, she drove across town as fast as she possibly could without breaking the law. The last time Aunt Elner had fallen and Norma had rushed over, she had been pulled over by the highway patrol and given a speeding ticket, the first one in her life, and to make matters worse, when she had driven away, she had backed up over the officer’s foot. Thank God he had been a friend of Macky’s or she might have wound up in jail for life. She knew she had to be careful not to get another ticket: she was obeying the speed limit, but as she drove, her thoughts were racing a hundred miles a minute. The more Norma thought about the events of the past six months, the madder she got and the more she began to blame Macky for Aunt Elner’s present situation. If they had stayed in Florida instead of coming back home, this would not have happened. When Norma reached the intersection out on the interstate and had to wait for the longest red light in the history of man to change to green, her mind flashed back to that fateful day just six months ago….

  It had been a Tuesday afternoon and Aunt Elner had been at her bingo game over at the community center. Norma had just come home from her Weight Watchers meeting, and had been in such a good mood because she had lost another two pounds and received a happy-face sticker from the leader, when Macky had dropped the bomb. When she opened the front door, he was in the living room waiting for her, and had that funny look on his face, the one he always had when he had made up his mind about something, and sure enough, he told her to sit down; he wanted to tell her something. “Oh God, what now?” she thought, and when he told her, Norma could hardly believe her ears. After Macky had gone through what she had dubbed his “middle age crazy period, ten years too late” and they had already sold the hardware store, their house, and most of their furniture, and had all moved, including Aunt Elner and her cat, Sonny, lock, stock, and barrel, all the way down to Vero Beach, Florida, he was now sitting there telling her that he wanted to move back home again! After only two years of living in their mint green concrete-block three-bedroom citrus view patio home in “Leisure Village Central,” he now said that he had had it with Florida—with the hurricanes and the traffic and the old people who drove thirty miles an hour. She had looked at him in total disbelief. “Are you going to sit there and tell me that after we have sold practically everything we own and spent the last two years fixing this place up, now you want to move back home?”

  “Yes.”

  “When for years all I heard out of you was, ‘I can’t wait until we move to Florida.’”

  “I know that, but—”

  She cut him off again. “Before we moved, I asked you, ‘Are you sure you want to do this now?’ ‘Oh yes,’ you said. ‘Why wait, let’s go early and beat the baby boomers.’”

  “I know I did, but—”

  “Do you also recall that it was at your behest that I gave away all our winter clothes to the Goodwill? ‘Why take all those old coats and sweaters to Florida,’ you said. ‘I’ll never have to rake another leaf or shovel another sidewalk of snow, who needs heavy coats?’ you said.”

  Macky squirmed a little in his chair as she continued. “But beside the fact that we now have no home, and no winter clothes, we can’t go back.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? What will people think?”

  “About what?”

  “About what? They will think we are a bunch of flibbertigibbets, that’s what, moving here and there, like a caravan of gypsies.”

  “Norma, we’ve moved once in forty years. I don’t think that qualifies us as flibbertigibbets or gypsies.”

  “What will Linda think?”

  “She doesn’t care, it’s perfectly normal for people our age to want to be around familiar settings and old friends.”

  “Then, Macky, why in God’s name did we leave in the first place?”

  This was an answer he had thought about and rehearsed. “I think that it was a good learning experience,” he said.

  “A good learning experience? I see. We now have no home, no winter clothes, no furniture, but it’s been a good learning experience. Macky, if you weren’t going to be happy here, why did we come?”

  “I didn’t know I wouldn’t like it, and tell the truth, Norma, you don’t like it here any more than I do.”

  “No,” she said, “I don’t, but unlike you, Macky, I’ve worked very hard trying to adjust, and I would hate to think I wasted two years of my life adjusting for nothing.”

  Macky sighed. “OK, OK, w
e won’t go, I don’t want to do anything to make you unhappy.”

  Then Norma sighed and looked at him. “Macky, you know I love you…and I’ll do what you want, but my God, I just wish you had thought this thing through. After they gave us that big going away party and all, then to crawl back home and say, ‘Surprise, we’re back.’ It will just be so embarrassing.”

  Macky leaned over and took her hand. “Sweetheart, nobody cares. A lot of people have moved somewhere and then moved back again.”

  “Well, I haven’t! And what does Aunt Elner think, I’m sure you two have discussed it.”

  “She said she’s happy to go back home, but that it’s up to you, she’ll do whatever you want.”

  “Oh great, as usual it’s two against one, and if I don’t say yes, I’m the dirty shirt.”

  She sat and stared at him, blinked her eyes a few times, then said, “All right, Macky, we’ll go, but promise me that a couple of years from now, you won’t get another wild hair and move us again. I can’t take another move.”

  “I promise,” said Macky.

  “What a mess. Now you’ve got me so upset I’m going to have to have some ice cream.”

  Macky jumped up, happy the thing was settled. “Don’t get up, honey,” he said. “I’ll get it. Two scoops or three?”

  She opened her purse and felt around for a Kleenex. “Oh…make it three, I guess, there’s no point in me going back to Weight Watchers if we are leaving.”

  Thankfully they sold the citrus view patio home in three days, with a thirty-day escrow. But still, it had been very upsetting to move again, and thank God she had not sold all of her knickknacks. She had kept her ceramic dancing storks music box, and her milk-glass top hat. They had been such a comfort to her in her time of need.

  Driving back home to Missouri, with Sonny the cat yowling all the way, she’d tried not to continue to complain like her mother used to do, but when Aunt Elner quipped from the backseat, “Norma, look at the bright side, at least you didn’t sell off your cemetery lots,” it set her off again. “Just when I was starting a new life, here we are going back home to die, like a bunch of old elephants headed back to the burial grounds,” she’d said. And to make matters worse, in the two years they had been in Florida, with the new software companies opening up and all the new people moving in, the price of real estate in Elmwood Springs had almost doubled. What had once been a small town, with only two blocks of downtown, was now experiencing suburban sprawl. And with another huge shopping center opening up out on the four lane, most of the town had moved to the outskirts, and their pretty four-bedroom brick house that had sat on an acre had been torn down to make room for an apartment complex.

  Elner had been the smart one. She had not sold her house but had rented it to friends of Ruby’s, who were gone now, so she could go back to her old house. But when they got back, all Norma and Macky could afford to buy was a two-bedroom two-story town home in a new development called Arbor Springs, and even then, Macky had to go to work at The Home Depot to help pay for that. At the time, Norma had begged Aunt Elner to move in with them, or to at least consider moving to an assisted living facility, but she had wanted to move back to her own house, and as usual, Macky took her side. And thanks to him, Norma was now headed over to see her oldest living relative, who had probably just broken a hip, an arm, or a leg, or worse. For all Norma knew, her aunt could have broken her neck and could be completely paralyzed, and she was probably going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

  “Oh no!” she thought. “Poor Aunt Elner will be miserable not being able to move around.” Hopefully, they would be able to get her one of those new motorized chairs, and of course, this would have to happen now, when they had just moved into a house with stairs with no wheelchair access. Well, she guessed Macky was just going to have to build a ramp, because the three of them could not possibly live in Aunt Elner’s small one-bathroom house, not with Linda and the baby coming to visit all the time.

  “I hope you’re happy now, Macky!” she said. “If you had listened to me, this would never have happened!”

  The three people in the car that waited next to her at the red light looked over at Norma, who was now talking out loud to herself, and wondered if she was a crazy person. By the time she reached the next red light, and as her mind continued to race, Norma wondered if maybe Macky was not entirely to blame. Maybe this whole thing could have been avoided if she had just put her foot down and had not agreed to move to Florida in the first place. At the time she had told Macky that she’d had a bad omen about them moving, but then, she had bad omens about so many things, she couldn’t be sure if it was really a bad omen, or just another symptom of her anxiety disorder. It was very frustrating, to not know when she should put her foot down and when she should not. The result was that she never really put her foot down about anything. By the time Norma was a block away from Aunt Elner’s house, Macky was completely off the hook, and now she was blaming herself entirely for Aunt Elner’s fall. “It’s all my fault,” she wailed. “I should never have let her move back into that old house!”

  Just then, Norma happened to look over and see the same three people in the car who had been at the last stoplight staring at her. She put the window down and said, “My aunt fell out of her fig tree” just as the light changed and they took off as fast as they could.

  Verbena Gets the News

  8:41 AM

  Verbena Wheeler was already at work down at the Blue Ribbon Cleaners and Fluff and Fold Laundromat when her husband, Merle, called and told her that Elner had fallen off the ladder again and this time had knocked herself out cold.

  “They are waiting on the ambulance right this very minute,” he said.

  “Ohhhh, Norma is going to have a fit, you know how she worries about Elner. Call me back and tell me as soon as you know something.”

  Verbena, a tight-lipped woman with a tight little gray permanent, was a Church of God, no-nonsense, strict Pentecostal, “I’m a Bible-beater and proud of it” kind of person who could quote from Scripture to fit any occasion. She had also been very worried about her neighbor, not only about her falling off a ladder, but about her rapidly changing belief systems as well. In her opinion, Elner Shimfissle had gone quite radical as of late, and Verbena was convinced she could trace the changes right back to the day Elner had gotten cable television, and had started watching the Discovery Channel. Verbena, who only watched TBS and religious channels, had been extremely concerned. “Too much science, too little religion,” if you asked her. To prove her point, only about a week after it had been hooked up, she had received an alarming phone call from Elner.

  “Verbena,” Elner said, “I’m just not so sure about the Adam and Eve story anymore.”

  Verbena had been stunned upon hearing such a thing coming from a lifelong Methodist in good standing.

  “Oh, Elner,” Verbena said, while holding on to the counter for support, “that’s a terrible thing to say…. Next you’ll be telling me you have become an atheist!”

  “Oh no, honey, I still believe in God, it’s just the Adam and Eve part I have a question about.”

  An alarm bell went off as Verbena suddenly grasped the real implications and the dire consequences of the word “question.” She gasped, “Don’t tell me that you’re thinking of throwing in with the evolutionists, not at this late date, I’m just shocked, you of all people.” Elner agreed, “Well, I’m kind of shocked at myself, Verbena, but if you ever doubted that we didn’t come from monkeys, then you need to see the show I saw on television last night, about those little snow monkeys they have over in Japan. They sit around all winter in hot tubs, and I swear to you, there was one that looked so much like Tot Whooten, I half expected it to talk. I’m telling you, honey, if you put a dress on it, put a comb in its hand, you’d be hard-pressed to tell them apart. The thing even had on blue eye shadow just like Tot’s…had her expression and everything!”

  Verbena had been very upset by the phone c
all. She knew that once a person had even the slightest doubt about Adam and Eve, the stories that followed—Cain and Abel, Noah and the Ark, on down the line—began to fall apart like a stack of dominoes. She had wanted to call Norma immediately and tell her that her aunt was being dangerously influenced by those so-called educational shows, and if she wasn’t careful, the next thing you know, she might wind up subscribing to The New York Times or joining the ACLU! Verbena knew it was just this kind of thinking that had led to taking prayer out of the school, and Christ out of Christmas. Verbena would have called, but was not quite sure just where Norma stood on the creation issue anymore.

  Norma’s mother, Ida, had been a strict Presbyterian, but after her mother died, Norma had joined one of those new age, nondenominational, one-size-fits-all, do-it-yourself churches that had moved so far away from the Bible that they hardly ever read it. And even when they did, their interpretation of the Scripture was far too loose to suit Verbena. She tried to warn Norma that joining that new age church was taking a mighty big chance with her immortal soul. Norma had not been rude, she had listened, and thanked her for her call, but she hadn’t gone back to a good Bible-based church either. A lot of the new people in town whom she tried to guide back to the Bible had been very rude, had even gone so far as to tell her to mind her own business. Some had even canceled their charge account down at the cleaners. She had taken a hit in her pocketbook and learned the hard way, it was best not to tinker around with matters of religion, not if you want to get along with your neighbors. But another reason she had not called Norma was that shortly after talking to Elner, Verbena had gone on the Internet. There was just no two ways of getting around it; Tot Whooten did look exactly like a snow monkey. It had surprised her at the time, but it had not shaken her faith; it stated quite clearly in Genesis 1:27, “So God created humankind in his image,” and there was just no way in this world Verbena would ever believe that God looked anything like Tot Whooten, or any of the Whootens, for that matter!