SCOTT ATKINSON
The elf was at ease, completely comfortable. It made you wonder. I certainly wasn’t comfortable, not looking at him or sitting among the small crowd of nonagenarians who’d gathered to watch his holiday performance at the Forever Young Assisted Living Center. He wore a green pointed hat with a small red feather in a band and a ruffled white shirt. His suspenders were attached to green pants so tight on his long, slim legs that no suspension was necessary. He had an accordion. It was the kind of costume your mother might make you wear for a Christmas pageant or Halloween, more concerned with the photo album than any actual memories being made. We made eye contact once, and he had not seemed embarrassed even then. Rather, he gave me the nod that all men give with unanticipated eye contact, some mutual acknowledgement of something neither can define—that we’re both men, maybe, and for the moment not at war. Coming from beneath that hat, it was comical. But I returned the nod, sitting in the back row of an audience who was waiting to die and, I assumed, like me, wondering how it had all come to this.
I wasn’t there for the elf. I’d been sent to the convalescent home on assignment, and was waiting on a man who was now twenty minutes late, who was supposed to introduce me to his mother, who was about to turn one hundred years old. I’d written at least two stories about the exact same thing. I think every reporter has. It was a torturous waste of time. I’d returned to the Flint Journal shamefully, hired—on the precipice of my thirtieth birthday—as an intern by the only editor in the world who knew me well enough not to plug my name into a search engine before an interview to see what popped up. I knew what popped up.
He knew me well enough, in fact, to give me some freedom and my own beat, but I was confined to this small outpost of a suburb that had once housed factory workers of General Motors and where now exactly nothing happened. I needed things to happen. The internship (I referred to it as a contract job) was my attempt to rebuild a portfolio and eclipse my recent past. A way to get back to the life and career I’d already cultivated— and maybe a way of proving to myself I could do it all the right way.
I was desperate enough that I was already thinking about how I might turn this into something more than just another story about a centenarian. I went over the cliché questions I was determined not to ask: What was it really like one hundred years ago? What did she think of the world today? Did she have an iPhone? What was her secret?
I could only hope that over the course of a century there was some- thing worth extracting, worthy of at least a thousand words that in the new age of digital publishing could go viral, at least be something you’d show to an editor in a city where people actually wanted to live.
I’d been waiting since the beginning of the elf’s show, which he’d started by explaining, as though to a group of Christmas music aficionados, that he’d be playing some standards as well as—he said with a little smile, as though suggesting something naughty—some more upbeat tunes. He was currently on “Jingle Bells.”
There were eleven in the audience, gathered around the elf, who stood in the center of a half moon of chairs, near the oversized Christmas tree that reached almost to the top of the gabled ceiling. It couldn’t be cheap to stay here. I looked at the people around me, in varying states of consciousness, and wondered who they’d once been, what they must have done to be able to afford it. Certainly not journalism. Doctors and lawyers, perhaps, jobs with titles that family members bragged about. If nothing else, they’d raised children who could afford to put them there, its own form of success especially in a town built on riveting cars together. They nodded vaguely, tapped canes softly, or clapped with gusto while the elf broke into “Let It Snow.” I had to give him this much: he could sing.
The sleigh bells at the door jingled, and I looked up to see a man remove his hat, the kind with the little ball on top, revealing a bald head ringed by wispy still-blond hair. He took a nervous look around the room. I stood and walked over to him.
“Are you Ben?” I asked.
“Richard?”
He shook hands quickly, as though being electrocuted, and looked around the room again. He was taller than me, though still not exactly tall, and had to be well into his seventies despite retaining a strange boyish energy. His mouth remained open in a slight and strange smile. It was the smile of a fish, worn constantly, and perhaps not really a smile at all. I’d thought he was younger when we spoke on the phone, not having done the math in my head. You don’t think of sons being potentially eighty. However old he was, he had a twitchy energy that put me on edge. He seemed like he wanted to run around the room screaming but had over the course of a lifetime learned to rein in those urges.
“I think it’d make a good story,” he’d said when we talked on the phone. “Something positive.” He’d then gone on to tell me about all the crap you have to read in the news every day, and I’d restrained myself and let him talk it out. Some people needed to, and I just didn’t have the fight in me anymore to defend the profession.
“Well, okay,” he said now, as though we’d just finished a conversation. “Let’s go see her.”
We walked toward a hallway, past a receptionist whom Ben waved to with a quick up-down of his hand, then down a hallway past doors deco- rated in Christmas themes like miniature front porches, until we reached an unadorned door, slightly cracked. Ben pushed it open.
She was sitting on the bed, facing away, at the other end of the room. She would have been looking out the window, except that the blinds were pulled. She didn’t appear to hear us and gave a small start when Ben put his hand on her shoulder. She looked at him and smiled, looking relieved. I surveyed the room, but was disappointed. I’d imagined a space full of what had once filled a house, artifacts that hinted at a life, but the room was almost empty. A lone painting, which matched the bedspread, hung on the wall.
I knew I should just knock out the story, get it done. It wouldn’t be hard. Like most reporters I’d developed an internal measuring device that let me know when I had enough for a story. Reporters talk all the time about getting more information than you need, and it’s true, but they don’t tell you that it’s only true for the stories you give a shit about.
“Mom?” Ben said. She looked toward him, startled, but like someone who is used to being startled. She smiled widely, revealing a large, horsey set of too-white teeth. Her eyes moved briefly toward me, and she retained her smile but looked confused and turned back to her son.
“Mom, this is Richard. He’s from the newspaper. Remember?” He did not talk more slowly but was more precise in his speech, each syllable given equal care and attention. “He’s here to talk to you about your birthday.”
“I’m turning one hundred!” she announced, all teeth. She looked happy.
Ben motioned toward a chair for me, a jerky opening and closing of his hand, his elbow still glued to his side. I took off my coat and laid it over the back of the chair. I’d learned that in most scenarios, people were more comfortable if you made yourself at home. Ben seemed to remember he was wearing a coat, a trench coat that looked like a bathrobe with him sitting on the bed. He stood and took it off.
I uncapped my pen and flipped my notebook to a fresh page. At the top I wrote “100-yr-old birthday girl” in a sloppy, almost unreadable script.
“Thanks so much for having me,” I said. Ben nodded in reply, a short neck spasm. His mother looked at me, confused, and then at Ben.
“Thanks so much for having me,” I said again, louder this time, and looked directly at the woman. She smiled her toothy smile.
Clapping and laughter made its muffled way down the hall, into the room. I pictured the elf giving a little bow, tipping his green hat. The accordion resumed. “Silent Night” this time.
He really could sing. Music was my weakness. I’d gotten into journalism in part because I could not make music myself, and thought I might write about it. After four years of journalism school, it turned out that the only market for someone like me was zoning meetings and soccer games. That was, until I got the dream gig. My talent, if it could be called that, was in questions. They just came to me in a way that had, when I was very young, driven my mother mad. How could you not wonder—where does one even learn to play the accordion? And what keeps them playing it?
“Mom’s got some stories. Don’t you, Mom?”
She nodded, not so much a reply to an answer but in a way that suggested it was how she got through most conversations.
“You must have seen so much in your life,” I said. It was a cliché prompt, but that was okay. The key was just to get them talking. Maybe I’d strike gold—that was what this business was all about. Not writing, and not always reporting. Right time, right place. That was what it came to, unless you learned that you could make your own gold and could somehow avoid the inevitable day when your editor called you into his office, your master- pieces splayed out in front of him on his desk, and said, unable even to look at you, “Just tell me it’s all true.”
She sat, mute and confused, while from down the hall I could faintly hear the elf sinking into an impressive baritone for “Old King Wenceslas.” It occurred to me then that I had perhaps left the real story behind. Indeed—who did play the accordion? Who dressed like that and was okay with it? How was he so content? I had a thing for musicians anyway, the harder the struggle, the better. And who, more than the elf, embodied that more? Who else had to know there was no shot at making it and yet, was here, still playing? The questions kept coming. I wasn’t even thinking of a story. For the first time in a long time, I just wanted to know.
“Mom,” Ben was saying. “Why don’t you tell him some things?”
She mouthed, “Oh,” and looked at me again. I smiled what I hoped was a warm smile, and she seemed to calm a bit. Showed me all those teeth. “I don’t need much,” I wanted to say. “When you were born, a couple of anecdotes for your past, tell me that the world has changed—it would make a fine lede—and I can take care of the rest. Sooner the better.”
“Let’s start with the technical stuff,” I said. “I haven’t even gotten your name yet.”
She looked at me.
“Can I get your name?” I said, then, louder, “What’s your name?”
“Nancy Smith,” she said.
“Standard spelling on Smith? S-M-I-T-H?” I looked to Ben.
“Yup, we’re the Smiths,” he said.
“And when’s the big day?”
She looked at me.
“When’s your birthday?”
“December twenty-ninth!”
“And what about family? Any other kids? Grandkids?”
Ben answered. “Just us,” he said, with the same fishy smile, though it was wider now.
“Well,” I said, turning back to Nancy, “where would you like to start?”
“You were very involved with your church, weren’t you, Mom?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, and seemed suddenly alive, or at least younger. “I was the secretary there for, oh, gosh, a long time.”
“She basically ran the place is what she did. That’s the truth. And of course I’ve been a deacon there for twenty years.” His mouth was open, like he wanted to say more, and I was sure he thought there was more to say. I saw it all the time. Everyone thought they had a story until it was time to tell it, and they realize they’d been holding onto a few small details their whole lives without realizing that’s all they had.
I wrote down “20 years” in blocky type, easy to read upside down.
“And what church was that, Nancy?”
“First Church of Christ,” Ben said. “You know they actually just built a whole new wing over there. I helped organize it. That wouldn’t be a bad story either.”
“What was it like being secretary there? What kind of things did you do?”
She looked at me.
“What was it like, just day-to-day?”
“Oh, I guess there wasn’t a whole lot to it. There were papers to file. Reminders you had to mail out. I didn’t organize any of the events. There were other women who did that.”
“She basically ran the place is what she did.”
I nodded along, writing down what they said.
“And you keep pretty active, don’t you, Mom?”
“What?”
“I said you keep pretty active, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes. I suppose. I’m in a pinochle club.”
And so we talked about pinochle. I tried. You can’t say I didn’t try. Was it competitive? Who was her partner? Were they the champions? Was there a plaque somewhere with her name on it? Was there a special sort of comradery among the players? Was this where she found purpose, or some peace, or … something, in her final years? But it was just pinochle. I had to find something else. My elf was still out there, onto “Oh Come, All Ye Faithful.”
“And of course she took care of our house too. My dad died twenty years ago. Worked for GM. Was a sit-downer, actually.”
“Oh, really?” I said. Did we write about him?”
The sit-down strike of the 1930s gave rise to the United Auto Workers union and, depending on whom you asked, was responsible for middle-class America or for the bankrupting of the company that finally left Flint in shambles. I’d known about it vaguely until my first internship, when I’d been assigned to help work on an anniversary story on it. My job was to go through the archives, and I’d gone even further, spending my own time at the local library reading on it and taking copious notes. In the end they used almost nothing I gave them and I didn’t even get a byline.
Some of that research came back to me. It was almost like a war, and it wasn’t only the men who fought it. Women took to the picket lines and snuck food into the factories, through windows that had been broken by teargas cans. They had tried to find women who’d been part of that, and no one could. Perhaps I just had.
“Did you take part in any of that? Any of the picketing or anything else?”
“You should ask her what this town was like when she was a kid,” Ben said. “It will blow your mind.”
“I’ve read about women who snuck food in, wore special hats and protested. I’m just curious if you had gotten involved in any of that.”
“Horses tied up next to cars. I think we have pictures somewhere.”
“I’m actually really intrigued about your dad and the strike. I mean, that must have been such an interesting time.”
“Oh, yes, he was worried then,” Nancy said, looking serious. “He kept saying, ‘Something big is coming.’ That’s all he would say before it happened. And then he got trapped inside with them,” she said, looking horrified. “I had to wait and hope that no one found out while he was in there.”
“Found out,” I said. “I guess I don’t understand.”
“Mom.”
“I guess I’m missing something here.”
“Mom.”
“He was an informant!” she said, holding up her index figure, announcing it like a military title.
“Okay, Mom.”
“A Pinkerton. A detective, you know.” She smiled. “I used to tease him. Called him gumshoe.”
I’d read about this, too, how GM had placed or recruited what were essentially spies inside, working on the line, in an effort to quell any possibilities of organization. That hadn’t made it in the story either.
“All right, Mom,” Ben said, smiling more widely now, but his tone was more serious. Nancy settled into herself, all those teeth disappearing. We were all silent.
“It’s been so long,” I said. “I mean, I get that it was a different time then. I’d love to hear more about that. From your perspective.”
She looked at her son, and I couldn’t help it, I could feel the story forming in my mind, how perfect it could be, the very process that had gotten me here in the first place. I fought it, tried to let the questions take control and not my imagination, the thing I might wish into being true. All I’d need then was some details, facts like mortar gluing together my story.
“My dad was a sit-downer,” Ben said, with an authority and finality I hadn’t thought he was capable of. He sounded like a man. Nancy was still, looking at the carpet.
I made one more honest attempt.
“Ben, this was, what, eighty years ago. This is a side of the story we don’t ever really hear.”
“My dad was a sit-downer,” he said, and looked at my notepad. “Write it down.”
I wrote it down.
It was silent again, more so than before. My elf was gone.
I waited for the moment to pass.
“So, Mrs. Smith,” I said, and she looked at me, smiling again, and I tried to see through it, through all those teeth, through the vague confusion and vacant smile, through all the unspectacular years to the contentedness that remained. “Tell me your secret.”
Scott Atkinson’s fiction has appeared in Carve Magazine, Failbetter, and several other publications. His essays and journalism, often about Flint, have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and elsewhere. He also teaches writing for the University of Michigan-Flint.