‘That’s sooooooo long ago.’
‘Hey! It’s not that long ago. Only, well let me see here—only sixty-four years ago. I was fourteen at the time, same age as you. Oh, but anyway, I was walking home and this seventeen-year-old boy comes rumbling up in his daddy’s 1937 Ford Pickup. He rolls down the window, runs his hand through his hair real slick-like and asks me if I want a ride. And wouldn’t you know it, his truck breaks down as soon as I slam the door shut!’
Grandma’s voice softens and she starts sniffing the air for a tear. ‘Well, I say to him, Looks like we aren't getting too far. And he says, Sure we will! I can fix it in a jiffy. So he pops open the hood – my knight in shining armor – and spends an hour trying to fix that dang truck. Finally, he gives up and says he'll walk me home. We were so young then. You just see me like this, an old wrinkly thing, but I was wild back then. Me and your grandfather, well, we had the best time together.’
Grandma has started to sob softly, tears of joy and remembrance. ‘It's ok,’ Dacha says, scooting closer to her.
‘I'm not crying… my dang allergies are acting up. It’s the cedar in the air. Always gets to me,’ she says, sniffing up what was left of her crying spell.
‘It's ok, Grandma.’
‘I guess it is, isn't it?’ She wraps her granddaughter into her arms. ‘Just you and me, huh?’
‘Yep.’
‘Well, that’s not true. You got a few cousins on your aunt’s side and there’s Uncle Bryan and Jimmy, but Jimmy hardly can remember us, but that’s ok. That’s more than a lot of people have, so no complaints I guess. The Good Lord hears enough of those. Look, I know it's hard, Dacha, I know. Not a day goes by that I don't think about Judy or your father. Not a day goes by. You know that, right?’
‘I know.’ Dacha breathes in her grandmother’s scent, a combination of mothballs and cocoa butter lotion. She squeezes tighter.
‘Oh, you know what, let's not talk about sad things,’ Grandma says, pulling away.
‘Ok.’
‘Hey! I almost forgot to tell you.’
‘What’s that?’ Dacha asks.
‘Jenny gave me something she got at the potpourri show over in Providence.’
‘What did she give you?’
‘Well, I don't want to ruin the surprise just yet, but I thought we could do some potpourri making tomorrow. The roses are dry by now and I was planning on showing you my little surprise then.’
‘A surprise? What is it? Some new ingredient or something?’
‘Not just any ingredient,’ she says.
‘Just tell me, I hate surprises.’
‘You’re too young to hate surprises!’
‘Oh, just give me a little hint.’
‘Ok, ok. The Attar of Rose.’
‘What is it?’
‘You'll find out tomorrow.’
***
~Just two weeks. I needed to make it just two weeks, and that’s as close to term as I could bring her. Then, they would be able to perform a C-Section and at least she’d be out. One of the doctors didn't think it was possible; the lady doctor was more hopeful, though. I'd lost so much blood, just so much. And there Bill was, with me every moment over the next two weeks. I'd wake up and he'd be bedside. I'd go to sleep and he'd fall asleep sitting next to me, holding my hand. He never left. I don't even think he ate during those two weeks. "Judy," he'd say, "We're going to make it through this." The two weeks came. Amazing, really. That morning, the doctor came in and explained that there was about a forty percent chance the baby would die, no matter what we did.~
Dacha is back on her bed, listening to her mother's voice on her iPod. She loves her mother's voice, goes to sleep to it every night, hears it in her dreams. It's sweet like melted marshmallows, soft as cotton balls. It's a voice all mothers should have. It’s the voice she hopes to have when she's a mother.
The room suddenly feels warm. Dacha cracks the window open and waits for a moment as the slightly chilled New England autumn curls in. She continues listening to her mother speak, watching as a pizza delivery man kicks open his car door. He runs up to the stoop of the Norwood's turreted home with its squamous shingles. The man pauses, adjusts his grip on his delivery bag, and knocks.
~On top of that, there was only a 15% chance that she would be ok, a 15% chance she wouldn’t have any birth defects. She had a higher chance of being on a ventilator for the rest of her life than she did having a normal childhood. She could have brain hemorrhage, or be severely deformed, or be blind or deaf.~
At this point, her mom starts weeping and catches herself.
~The risks were just so high. We didn't want her to hate us for giving her a life not worth living. How could we know what was in her best interest? How could we know if she would survive? Was I being selfish? Was God trying to tell me something? And as we were discussing all this, we could hear the baby's heart through the monitor.~
Dacha lies on her bed, squeezes Kitty Face.
~I glanced over at Bill, and he had that look on his face, the same look he had when we got mugged in St. Petersburg. It was a determined look, maybe even a stubborn look, but his look said that we weren't going to back down. And the doctor knew this, and I knew this as soon as I looked over at my husband. The doctor asked if we were sure, and we knew at that instant that we were more sure than we’d ever been.~
~It wasn't exactly a yes or no answer. It was more of the baby’s choice than we originally thought. If she came out blue – likely the result of intraventricular hemorrhaging – she would die. If she came out crying and moving around, they would do everything in their power to keep her alive. It all rested on that little heartbeat.~
While hugging Kitty Face, she falls asleep at the part where her mom goes into labor and Dacha is delivered by C-section; the part where she is immediately cast into an incubator and taken to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. In her dreams that night, Dacha is in a plastic bubble looking out onto a blurry world filled with blinking lights and people huddling around her. She’s poked, prodded, and all the while, her mother's happy voice dances around her, cooing, and her father's voice – thata girl, he says – offers encouragement like a good coach.
***
Dacha wakes with her bladder full and her bedroom door ajar.
It's morning, and an arc of light is cutting across her bedroom. She stands, stretches, and heads to the bathroom. They always choose a spicy scent for the bathroom in the fall. Combine two cups of cinnamon broken into cereal-sized pieces, nine drops of clove oil, two cups of hemlock pine cones, bay leaves, a cup of lamb's ear leaves, and three tablespoons of dried orange peels to create the perfect fall aroma: brisk and slightly tart.
Lamb's ear reminds Dacha how much things change. Grandma claims that the soft, fuzzy leaves were once used to sop up blood. In the West Indies, it was used to make a tea similar to chamomile. In the Middle East it was crushed into a balm and used to ease birthing pains. Its smell, a subtle combination of bubble gum and pineapple, enhanced the tartness of the cinnamon and the earthy sweetness of the clove.
From the hallway, she can hear her grandmother rummaging around in the kitchen downstairs. Preferring French press coffee due to its thickness and flavor, Grandma rises every morning at 7:10 and boils water in an old copper tea kettle with a melodic whistle. That sound – always at 7:22 – is what usually wakes Dacha. Figuring she still has seven minutes to sleep, Dacha returns to her bedroom and crawls under the covers.
It’s amazing how seven minutes can drag on like seven hours. Dacha burrows deeper under the cover and thinks about the next part of the radio interview with her mother. She knows it by heart, can mouth every single word. It’s the part about her name.
~Bill and I are looking at her in the incubator and I'm crying, just amazed at the beauty of life. There she is, our little wrinkled daughter, with her tiny eyebrows and fingers and nose. Only one problem… her color was off. She wasn't pink; her skin was almost clear and you could see the blue veins running t
hroughout her body. We agreed on a name right then and there: Dacha, the Russian word for cottage. It's where Bill and I first met while we were both doing graduate work in St. Petersburg. We were both invited to a mutual colleague’s summer cottage for a weekend and we married exactly one year later. It was a funny name, Dacha, but it had a meaning behind it. For us it meant chance and good fortune, something a baby in the NICU is greatly in need of.~
The tea kettle sounds and Dacha blinks her eyes open. Minutes later, she runs down the stairs to Grandma yelling for her to slow down. Dacha slows her pace and enters the kitchen to find her making blueberry buttermilk pancakes. Grandma’s mixing the batter and slurping loudly from her cup of coffee, which she takes with one sugar, a dash of nutmeg, and a spoonful of sweetened condensed milk. She’s humming the same song she always hums in the morning, Amazing Grace.
‘Coffee?’ she asks. ‘I made too much.’
‘I never drink coffee, Grandma.’
‘Well, it doesn't mean you won't one day.’
‘I'll just have some orange juice.’
Dacha sits, rubs the sleep out of her eyes, yawns. She doesn't like Saturday mornings. Too much anticipation for the weekend to come. Sad that it ends as quickly as it started and then it’s back to Monday, back to the ninth grade.
Grandma pours some of the batter into the sizzling skillet. ‘Oh, I made it a little too hot,’ she says as she turns the heat down. ‘Dacha, the first one might be a little burnt, ok?’
‘It's ok.’
‘Did you sleep well? Any dreams?’
‘Nothing I can remember.’
‘That's good, Dear. Oh! That's hot, alright let me see here...have to flip it over...there you are you little bastard.’
Dacha laughs. She finishes her glass of orange juice in a single gulp and watches the pulp slide down the inside of the glass.
‘Oh, that's not what I meant to say. I meant to say stinker. There you are you little stinker!’ Grandma says, furrowing her brow. Ten minutes later, she sets a large oval plate with blueberry pancakes on the table. She returns to the kitchen for syrup and honey then sits down across from Dacha, quickly saying Grace.
‘Not too much now…’ Grandma watches Dacha press a slab of butter between two piping hot pancakes.
‘I know, I know.’
‘That's what got your grandfather,’ she says. ‘Bad cholesterol. Too much junk foods, butter, pork, bacon. Oh, do you remember his egg yolk shakes?’
‘I remember.’
‘Those were bad too,’ Grandma says.
‘They didn't taste so bad.’
‘That's because he blended them with whole milk and vanilla – a melted down milk shake with added protein if you ask me. Oh, who are we to talk, we're eating pancakes!’
‘Just once per week though,’ Dacha reminds her. She presses her fork down through the stack of pancakes on her plate. The syrup gives the pancakes a candy-coated shine that sparkles under the orange chandelier in the dining room.
‘Our Saturday morning routine,’ Grandma says. ‘Are you going to be ready to get to work after this?’
‘Sure.’
‘I almost forgot!’ Grandma hobbles to the living room and comes back with a small vial filled with a beer-colored liquid. She sets it on the table between them. A piece of surgical tape is wrapped around the neck of the vial and black fingerprint smudges shade the contours of the tape giving it depth. The vial is capped by a piece of cork.
The Attar of Roses.
***
‘So it's an oil?’ Dacha asks with her mouth full of pancakes.
‘Not just any oil. This oil is made from thirty-two thousand damask roses. Thirty-two thousand, Dacha. Jenny bought it from a man outside the Potpourri Convention. He only had two, so she bought them both.’
‘How much did it cost?’
‘Oh...’
‘Tell me, Grandma.’
‘Well, each vial was two hundred dollars. So four hundred. ‘
‘You paid two hundred dollars for that?’ Dacha stops chewing.
‘No, Jenny did.’
‘And you bought it from her?’
‘Not exactly. She owed me two hundred dollars from a game of bridge. So now we're even.’
‘I thought you stopped playing bridge for money,’ Dacha says, swallowing a lump of pancake.
‘Well, it was a while back. Last spring. She owed me from then. Oh, Dacha, the details don't matter… I have the Attar of Roses. Aren't you excited?’
‘It's just rose oil, right?’
‘Just rose oil? It's not just any rose oil, Dacha, the Damask Rose is famous! Thousands of years ago, it was woven into wreaths and buried in Egyptian tombs. The Damask Rose is a symbol of love, of beauty, of spirituality and remembrance. Aside from that, it’s also symbolic of mankind – it’s been cultivated to a point where it doesn't even grow in the wild anymore! Imagine that. Thirty-two thousand of these roses are crammed into this tiny little vial. Thirty-two thousand.’
Dacha stares long and hard at the bottle and its murky yellow liquid. Grandma goes on to tell her about an Iranian doctor named Avicenna, and how he was the first to distill rose water; about the Islamic Golden Age, and how many people – especially Dacha's uncle – are misinformed about the Middle East. ‘And who can blame them?’ she asks. ‘Look what's on the news every day? A few people dig the graves for many.’
Grandma then moves onto the benefits of Aromatherapy, explaining how people ridiculed the German-Swiss alchemist Paracelsus until he used the medical properties of plants and oils to treat Leprosy.
‘It's something to behold,’ Grandma says, getting all worked up. Dacha can see it in her eyes, her passion for this one ridiculous hobby: that misguided art of holding onto something just to have something to hold on to. And her passion becomes contagious. Now Dacha is interested, the sugar from the pancake syrup flowing through her bloodstream and tingling in her toes and fingers. She's excited now, ready to open the vial.
‘Can I smell it?’
Her grandmother stops talking and looks gravely from Dacha to the bottle. She bites her bottom lip. ‘I think we should wait until the rest of the potpourri ingredients are prepared. It’ll give us time to prepare our noses.’
‘Prepare our noses?’
‘I know it sounds stupid, but trust me on this.’
They finish breakfast, and while Dacha does the dishes, Grandma watches CNN. ‘Oh,’ she calls out from the living room, ‘looks like things are heating up in Turkey.’
What do you mean?’ Dacha asks, turning down the pressure of the water. Using her thumb, she scrapes a burnt blueberry off the skillet and watches it spiral down the drain.
‘Now they have an image to inspire protesters. Good for them!’
‘What do you mean?’
‘A woman in a red dress was sprayed with teargas and someone took a photo just in the nick of time. You should come see this Dacha. She's only about ten or fifteen years older than you. Just standing there with a white purse over her shoulder getting sprayed in the face. Pretty dress too. It’s all so horrible. Look at the way these governments behave! Oh, and look at that mask that guy is wearing.’
‘Mask?’
‘It's made out of one of those nurse's masks and a three liter Coke bottle cut in half. They never had masks like that in the sixties! Oh, this is getting to be too much now. Too much blood for one Saturday morning! I’d better switch the channel. You almost ready?’
‘Just one more plate,’ Dacha says. She cleans it, checks the bottom for syrup residue, and slides it into the plastic dish rack. She turns to the living room and sees the Attar of Roses. It looks so alone all by itself on the large mahogany table. For a brief moment, Dacha hears her mother's voice radiating from the vial.
~She was just so alone in the incubator. You could even see her heart thumping against her chest. It's my daughter, I thought, and she might not make it. She was bruised up – the doctors were careful, but premature babies are just so fragile
– and her eyes looked like they had been stitched shut. It's ok to touch her, the doctor said, just don’t rub the skin, otherwise it could peel off. The doctor had me wash my hands and dry them. I stuck my hand into this porthole on the side of the incubator. It would be the first time I’d touched my daughter, and I was trying my hardest not to get emotional. Bill was watching behind me, telling me it would be ok. I pressed Dacha's shoulder, and she reached out and grabbed my finger. She just grabbed my finger, and as stupid as it sounds, we knew at that moment that she was going to make it, that she was going to be ok.~
Dacha checks to make sure her grandmother is still in the living room. She hears the murmur of the TV, and the metallic voice of a woman newscaster seeking commentary from a college student at a university near the Bosporus Strait. She turns to the table. Her hand wraps around the Attar of Roses and she begins prying at the cork with her blue fingernail.
‘Dacha, you ready?’ Grandma calls from the living room. Dacha nearly drops the bottle, catches it in time, and jams the cork back in. She quickly sets it back on the table.
‘Yes...yes! Just finished.’
‘Good,’ Grandma says, ‘let’s get the ingredients.’
***
Dacha meets her grandmother in the living room and they head to the garage. They circumvent a pile of boxes Grandma keeps saying she's going to label, and walk to a closet next to her grandfather’s old workbench. The closet is filled with tools, some rusty others in near mint condition, and smells like a strange mixture of metal and flowers. Hanging from a nail, with their stems tied together by a string, is a large bunch of red and white roses.
The roses are wilted, their petals the consistency of wax paper. Grandma removes the bunch and hands it to Dacha. She reaches into a cabinet painted the same color white as the swing on their back porch, and retrieves a few paper bags with words written on their folds in permanent marker: lavender, sandalwood, clary sage, orris root, clove, dried lemon peels. She shows Dacha the bag of clary sage.
Zombie Lolita: (A Collection of Short Stories) Page 4