Under the pressure of age and illness she lost her happiness, dragging herself from room to room, the house a prison now, hers and ours. One of us had to be there because she couldn’t do what she had always done. She couldn’t do so we had to but we could never get it right.
In the night she got up to go to the bathroom, dragging herself down the hall, and we lay, whichever of us was there, hearing each scrape of the walker, each muttering, each lurch into the wall. She encouraged herself but it was a bitter encouragement. Come on old Jo, she said. Come on, beating the horse of her body that had let her down, that had weakened and broken. We lay, rigid in our bed, listening until she was back in her room again, until she laid herself down and looked for sleep.
(She said she heard a bird pecking away at the outside of the house, pecking so fiercely that she was sure it would make its way in.)
In the old days she was quick and sure. She made a meatloaf, slapping ketchup on it with red-stained hands. She mowed the lawn in her oldest clothes, resting in the shade with a glass of lemonade when one section was done. She chivied our father into going for a walk after dinner, down the curve of their road and onto the next and back around. She criticized our clothes and our hair in a way that made us feel irritated and loved.
Now she was thin as a monkey, her hands like claws. Her beautiful white hair lay flat against her head, tamed at last. The hall carpet was flecked with lint, the refrigerator cluttered and stained. On the patio, the chairs where she and our father had rested when the lawn mowing was done lay empty under the sun, their cushions fading to white.
(What is that noise, she’d ask, that hammering. We told her they were building a house on the other side of the trees where there had been a blackberry field, where she had picked berries like the country girl she was once. And again she’d ask, what is that noise, that hammering, not every day but some days, you could never tell which.)
When the nurses came she was sweet and biddable, as if they were her daughters, while we stood by, graceless and cloddish, the real daughters who made her take her pills and who put things away on the wrong shelf. The nurses pronounced her charming, and she was, calling up the remnants of her former self. She was coquettish with the doctor, who we hated for no good reason (he did his best, but in fact there was no best to be done.)
We were adults but somewhere underneath still eight and eleven and fifteen, when she was a power, a goddess, the dispenser of new shoes and books of fairy tales and extra money to get a hot fudge sundae on the way home from school. She sent us out to play in the rain in our underwear so that we could love the cold and the wet and then the warmth of the towel rubbing us dry in the hall, blades of grass sticking to our legs, our hair dripping down our necks. When we lay in bed then, the sight of her in the half-lit hall reminded us that we were safe, that morning would come and take away the dark. We had to be grownup now but it was hard.
(She sat perched on the bar stool in the kitchen while we made her dinner, each step of which we did not quite get right.)
We brought flowered sheets to the bedroom we slept in on alternating nights, our childhood bedroom. Cushions. A plant. As if these things would make anything better. We tried not to look into the mirror for fear we would see our young selves or that they would see us.
The last thing was that she fell, her bones crumbling away, no matter how many calcium pills she had taken, or pretended to take, or had slipped into the trash when no one was looking. We came as quick as we could though it was snowing, our car getting stuck at the bottom of the driveway. We shoveled and pushed to get it out of the way of the ambulance. She went to the hospital and we were sure she’d come back, although she lay so flat on the bed it was as if there was no flesh to her, the blanket hardly raised.
At the last she was silent. Was she thinking? We sat beside her, or crouched rather, for sitting was not close enough. We spoke to her although her eyes were closed. Her lips moved but there was no sound. Her hand moved over the turned-down sheet as it used to when she swept crumbs from the tablecloth, her fingers rasping over the linen. We said things we hoped she’d remember but was it possible to remember when you moved into that vast silence? We said them anyway. At the last, we crawled up on the bed beside her one more time as if she could comfort us because she always had.
~
Mary Grimm has had three books published, Left to Themselves, Transubstantiation, and Stealing Time. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Antioch Review, and Mississippi Review, as well as in a number of journals that publish flash fiction, including Helen, The Citron Review, and Tiferet. Currently, she is working on a series of climate change novellas set in past and future Cleveland.