Nightwork: Stories (6 page)

“You,” I say to my sister. “You’re the one who nurses her. You look for the bruises. Helping Mother in and out of tubs—you, you dress her, when I won’t even touch her clothes, when most of what I see of Mother puts me to sleep.”

Her old-lady feet! The monastic growth, the narrow, curling yellow nail of her big toe, the little thorns of all the others—such feet should be covered, I think, but my sister talks of pedicures. The ticktock of Mother’s feet under the sheets, the vacant rooms, the hospitals, do not scare her.

I am not my sister. I will not put salve on Mother’s sores or comb the smoky hair that flares off her high forehead. Mother’s damp heats repel me.

“You are good to her,” I say. “But she is worse when you are around. Then she plays the baby, and you feed her. It makes me sick to watch her pulling on the spoon—and you! The way you scoop food off her chin!”

“What else can I do?” my sister says, smiling at the faces I am making, the querulous mouth and shaky
hand, the what, what, what that is me playing Mother, fumbling her way to ask, “What did you girls do last night?” And the night before that, and the day, the day before, the winter, the spring, the rebuking summer—all gone by while the nurses have been turning Mother, keeping Mother clean in a clean bed.

The nurses, I half-expect to see them in the attic, in the fumy cedar closet of the attic, nurses, heavy and alike as the clothes bags my sister carries, another and another. Nurses, the ones whose upper arms strain even the sleeves of their coats, I have seen them hoist Mother. From under her arms, they lift her long body. They say, “If you’re going to live on your own, we want to see you out of bed. We want to see if you can vacuum.” The nurses say, “So,” giving her a dust cloth and a can of cleanser, leaving Mother with her walker in a space that could be hers. “Are you up to it,” the nurses ask, “this independent living?”

“I have no patience,” I say, and watch the collapse of clothing bags, tilted as for a fire, ready to kindle—if we had the courage.

But nothing much here would burn entire, I think, only slowly in a noxious stink of plastic, canes smoking into lips, braces stumped as closed-off joints on amputees. A fire such as this would be all smoke.

So what are we going to do with these appliances, these sheets? Such things, so evidently used, are they ever used again?

“Would you sleep on these sheets?” I ask my sister—and these are good heavy sheets we have here, warm, heavy sheets. They smell of bandages and soap.

No, she shakes her head, which means, I guess.
we’ll throw them out like so much else toward the making of the new house, the house Mother always said she wanted: “Hose down, no care.” And she has almost achieved it there in the hospital with the nurses she calls out to by name. “Nancy, Laurie, Gail, come in and meet my daughters.” These smiling nurses with stories of us in their eyes, we have met them before. “Yes, yes,” the nurses say, pinching off the dead heads of donated flowers, standard arrangement—no smell. But there is baby’s breath and a foil balloon that someone has tied to the rail of Mother’s bed. This could be a party, a birthday party, but this is every day where Mother lives: dessert as something special, as having come from someplace special, sheet-cake occasions down the hall or weddings bonged across the street. “What a treat!” the nurses coax. “Sit up, dear. Eat,” they say, and I see, or imagine I see, the soldier that is Mother, the yellow opalescent skin on her thin arms, her thin arms trembling to raise herself from bed. Oh, why should it be strange how, loving death the way she has, our mother wants to live?

Outside the attic window, there are no streets, only scrub and scratchy plants, wind or quiet, dust—dust enough for me to write Please Wash Me on the window.

My sister holds a broom and sweeps.

AN UNSEEN HAND
PASSED OVER THEIR
BODIES

M
y son is coughing in his sleep next to me in my bed, where he has come to spend what is left of this night. My son’s cough is red, noisy, and loose, a clattering wagon on its jagged way down, with me all ears to the racheting sound of my child-self in the bed next to Dad, who is tossing and threatening. “Stop coughing,” Dad says. “You’ll wake the dead.” Bat flap and smoke in the dark of his voice make me hold back this need, hold back from Dad, whose fleshy skull clenches every raw cough I cough. I want to be still. I fix on the chafed, pitted folds at his neck with a promise to sleep, as if my quiet could ease and uncoil this turned-away man, but I can’t and it’s out, rude air through the pipes, a dry sound full of rust. Dad says, “I’m too old for this.” He says, “Oblige me,” and I watch the words turn in this room he calls his own.
Dad’s porch, sleeping headquarters, off-limits. How did I get here, close enough to smell him? That’s what I want to know: How did I?

Rolled, damp toweling—the kind Dad sometimes swipes at me—he smells like that. He smells like shaving water, where he floats his brush and lets me blow apart the suds before he snaps a towel, says, “Out. That’s enough; go get dressed.” I only pretend to leave. He never shuts the door all the way, and I want to see, and I can, if I am careful, if I am clever. From where I am hiding, just outside the bathroom door, I can see him. I can see him oiling his back under the sunlamp. It makes me feel lazy just watching him: the way my father massages himself and rolls his shoulders in this heat. So much heat, so much white in wild refraction off the swivel mirror; I see he has to squint to see the parts of himself in the magnified side, where the black eye, lashless and fast, his eye, finds me.

I am almost sure of this—that my father only pretends I am not there.

Like he pretends in his bed this dopey snooze; says, “I give up”; says, “Let me just shut my eyes.”

Am I not the woman he cannot keep out?

I want to wake him still.

I want to shrill in his ear: “Look, you!”

But the thought of him makes me close my eyes, try to sleep, a girl.

I hold to the edge of my bed and watch him sleep. I don’t move. I let my son take up all the room he wants, knowing he will slip away before I am even awake, and even after I have been so quiet, so good.

THE ENCHANTMENT

S
omeone else was in the room, I think—the second wife. High-parted hair, lips absently applied—the second wife had been the one to go on talking to my grandfather. Not the first—the first left, licking salt from the wide rim of her glass; the third, we knew, was spending Daddy’s money. My grandfather said to me, “We wanted you to hear this,” and I think I remember it happening this way; there was another in the room, not just my father and my grandfather but my father’s second wife.

We were told—my grandfather told us, speaking to me, “Your father is tired; he needs a rest.”

I saw my father’s head fall forward—monk’s bald spot, mad curls. Broad, broad-hearted, rufous chest, a squalling red—my father was alive and in the world and feeling everything extremely.

Did she move to touch him, the blur behind, whoever else was in the room—because I didn’t. In the face of that face then lifted to me, I smiled to hear him name a place, which when I heard it, I might even have been there, or else my memory is so profligate and willfully confused, but I think I always knew this place where my father was going. In a long car that gentled over the grated threshold, my grandfather took him, and sometimes, me, past swells of lawn and more lawn, wind and slashes of high blue sky in the heads of furious trees. Odd men they were I saw standing in the spiny leaves, pinching winterberries; bent-over figures in discourse with the air. How could my father sleep here? I wanted to know, but the second wife was in the car, too, saying it was hard to be surprised this way, come upon by family.

“Visitors is what we are. We won’t stay long,” my grandfather said, and we had made it through the lunch when we saw the other slinkers in the damp strawed beds, heard them call, “Professor!” bow and smirk; and I thought he seemed pleased, my father, until he turned to ask, “Why this?”

“Why what?” my grandfather asked. “Tell me what. What are you asking? What is it you want? Do you know what you want? Do you know what you are doing?”

My grandfather said, “You have no idea,” but my father kept behind, speaking rapidly, voice soft, my father asking why when the windows whirred up, and he was left turning in the turnaround to see us go. A man in a short robe, left unsashed, how did it feel to
him, I wondered, the worried, furrowed inside seam of his short robe’s pocket?

In the coats he left behind, I had gritted my nails on the inside seams of Father’s pockets, gritted and sucked them clean.

I did not see him then for a time that passed in the way of winter, colorless and stubbled and flat. The days clicked past same as hangered linens from my grandfather’s laundress, underwear cupped in puffs next to slips—my own, only my own, nothing of my father’s the way it had been when we shared in the last house a dresser, a closet, a bathroom down the hall.

My father’s knocking, I thought I heard it, and I remembered.

“What,” Grandfather said, “you must remember what.”

“See here,” my grandfather said to the company—not her, but men like my grandfather with vacation faces, smooth and oiled and brown. Same suits, thin cuffs, glint of heavy watches when they signed. Here and here and here—so many papers.

“What am I a party to?” she asked when she arrived, knife-pleated skirt and filmy blouse, spectacles for reading, a pair for seeing out.

“This,” my grandfather said, as surely as he cleared his throat or pulled at his eccentric too-big clothing;
and the second wife came to where we stood hooding our eyes from the dazzle at the window. Water from such a height was a dizzying coin—that, and the hard shore, the palings of trees, and closer to the house, at our feet from the window, the raw paving of my grandfather’s terrace, a stony estate designed to withstand winters that cracked the very roads—to whom now would all of this be given?

I didn’t quite ask, really. I hoped to be polite. “How much do you have, Grandfather? For how long has this been yours?”

My grandfather said for as long as he remembered. He was born in the bedroom where he once slept with a wife. He said, “I have always been comfortable.”

I wanted to be comfortable.

In the sunroom with the easy men in pearly colors, I spoke freely of my father and of what I had seen with and without wives, waking to my father in his sleepless disarray, a man in tears, kissing my foot and saying I had saved him—my father always threatening death—rolled playbill in his pocket, at my face his sugared breath: We should, we should.

“Yes,” she said. “I have seen him with her in this way and been afraid.” His temper, for one, as when the milk had boiled over—scalded; and of course, he wouldn’t drink it, but argued through the rising light before he took his sleep. “Insomniacs,” she said, “are true accountants; they are smug about the time they keep. But he sold the family silver,” she said.

“He is not rich,” my grandfather said.

I did not tell them what my father had bought me, but I wore the earrings and the small, slight clothes he
had said I would grow into—and I had. Even as my grandfather spoke, I was lifting off elastic from where it pinched me.

Breasts, my own.

Breasts, hands, long, thin feet and water-thinned soles—mine—walking the cold stones of my grandfather’s terrace, the cold knocking me just behind the knees every time; but not so with her, the second wife in broken shoes, a generous sweater; she was warm.

She asked, “Did you ever think I heard you? Did you wonder if I knew?”

I had wondered if there was other breathing in the room, a greater dark near the doorway rimmed in downstairs light, and which wife standing, the second, third, or first—in this way alike, watching or sometimes driving for him when Daddy said he could not concentrate to drive—made sick by just the entrance at Grandfather’s gate.

“Was it for money that we came here?” I asked—all those Sunday dinners with the slavering roast sliced bloody on the tines of the carving tools. Grandfather’s rare meat and garden vegetables, not the lunch we had on visits to my father’s last new place, but Sunday dinner and the long white afternoon in a room where we sat reading until supper.

Quiet, the gaping stairways still and cold, cold air hissing through the sills—the rooms I looked into were dark and cold except for where my grandfather was reading Sunday’s papers after the visit to my father; or it might have been after the visit from the pearly men—or any Sunday, really. It might have been that we were alone, long years alone, my grandfather and
I, the wives fled and the cook’s night off, so what were we to do but what we did? We took the afternoon’s roast, and it seems to me this happened: My grandfather gave me a knife and fork and said, “Take what you want,” and we cut into the bleedy meat and picked at it standing, not bothering with plates, with no one there to scold for what we did, pouring salt into a spoon of juice and drinking from a meat so raw it still said Ouch! at a prick from the tines of my grandfather’s enormous bone-handled fork.

My nails were grimed with cinder, my lips a smear of grease.

Complicitous season, winter, the day blacked as sudden as did the hallway from my room to his, and we often did not make a visit to my father. We often stayed at home, saying we would only have to turn around again, and so we did not visit—or phone, as my father complained to me, brushing his lips against the mouthpiece of the phone, voice over ocean on the holidays’ connections, sometimes cut off.

The way my father talked! Tremulous show-off, he was, all fustian to-do when in the last new place we saw him with his friends, the same we always caught peeking in on us together. “Still here!” my father said, as if another place were possible. “Come in, please, come in.” We were introduced again, but I remember no one’s name. Even the faces are gone. We had come to see my father. Grandfather and I—and sometimes the second wife—we hadn’t driven this far just to shake some soft hands.