Amateur Hour

by Kimberly Harrington

  We are doing and feeding and working and worrying and living and crying and questioning and hooting and loving. Just as we always have.

  We are alive; we are living.

  And we are here.

  We are here.

  We are here.

  Ashes to Ashes

  We had missed her by five minutes.

  This woman who always knew where the camera was and would pause midstride to angle her shoulders and flash a smile. This woman who didn’t squander a minute or a talent. This woman who was all in—raising children and cherishing grandchildren, working when that wasn’t expected, independent yet nurturing, teaching and guiding, ironing every shirt within striking distance, and loving her husband deeply until his last breath, sixty-one years after their wedding day.

  For six years we had worried about her mind, her loss. For three years, I felt like every goodbye was The Goodbye. And in the past year, she had retreated almost completely into herself, rarely speaking. But in the end—after all that slow-motion time—the time between the middle-of-the-night call from the nursing home telling us to come back, back down the street, she was getting close, was clearly not enough.

  We burst through the door, bleary-eyed and:

  “I’m so sorry, she’s gone. About five minutes ago.”

  She was gone. My grandmother was finally, joyfully gone.

  Gone from the lack of fresh air and an abundance of confusion. Gone from the most basic of controls over her own body, mind, and routine. Gone from this life that couldn’t shake her loose, not just one time but half a dozen times. Gone from an agonizing decline that felt cruel and unending. Gone from us, forever.

  My aunt rushed to her side, held her face and touched their foreheads together, tears rushing. After all this, you go out the side door?

  Just hours before, exhausted, I had arrived from Vermont and crawled into my grandmother’s bed, resting my head on her shoulder. I yawned and felt on the edge of sleep. I felt tears slip across my nose and drop-drop-drop onto my arm. Rolling sadness, relief, and love. I only knew the time based on the blare of her roommate’s TV, turned to the evening news. Loud tragedies unfolding everywhere. A quiet mercy slowly unfolding next to me.

  * * *

  We sat there, the hallways of the nursing home still. The nurse with the towels and sponge, the surgical gloves, telling us to take our time. The supplies to wash my grandmother’s body waiting stacked on the counter.

  “I just finished reading a book about funeral homes and death. About how families always used to wash the body themselves, often the women did it. It was no different than taking care of any other family member, like taking care of kids.”

  My comment hung in the air. More time passed.

  I looked over at the stack of supplies; they waited still.

  I looked at my aunt. What I was about to suggest making no sense for the person I had always been—the one who was squeamish about everything under the best of circumstances, the one who had to steel herself for morning breath or applying a Band-Aid. The one who felt uncomfortable visiting my grandmother in her last year, not sure how to act, if it was okay to touch her, not wanting to hurt her or misunderstand her or embarrass myself.

  This person, me, was the same one who suddenly asked, “Do you think we could help the nurse wash her body?”

  Without missing a beat, my aunt Janet replied, “I used to work in a nursing home. I’ve done this. We could do it.”

  My uncle Pierre left to get coffee.

  The room was quiet, the feeling reverent yet workmanlike.

  “I’ll do this side, then you do the same thing on her other side,” she said.

  I was surprised by the smoothness of her skin, especially across her back and legs. She was ninety-three and I had feared what age was already doing to me, never mind what it had done to her. But her body was just a body, like any other body. Her left breast gone but its absence surprisingly not jarring in the least. The surgery scars sprinkled across her body marked every time age or disaster or disease tried to take a swipe at her. They did not mark her deficits; they were a tally of her triumphs.

  The warmth of her body a reminder of how close we had been, how close you can be and still miss each other completely. The soapy washcloth gliding across her skin no differently than it would over a baby in a bathtub. You cradle and hold, because the person in your care cannot keep themselves from going under. Rinse the cloth, retrace steps with a clean cloth. Dry.

  We paused often to sip coffee from our Dunkin’ Donuts cups. On the graveyard shift, we were workers. None of it felt strange. And it felt strange that it didn’t feel strange.

  When we had to turn her on her side to wash her back, we called in both of my uncles. They tried to absorb what was unfolding as if this wasn’t the most out-of-left-field thing that had ever happened. Their mother and mother-in-law had just died, and now here the women were, washing her body, as if Americans did that ever. As if it was no different than any other task, folding laundry, doing the dishes.

  Janet tried to instruct them where to hold the sheet my grandmother was lying on but they wanted clearer direction; they wanted to make sure the sheet kept her covered. Things got tense, a little bit, as grief crashed over our task. Everyone sorting and absorbing what this moment meant, unsure what it might mean later. Was this the right thing to do?

  Finished, they cleared the soapy towels we had set aside. They left the rest to us. Janet took a sip of her coffee, looked up at me with an arched eyebrow, and under her breath mumbled, “Men.”

  We both burst out laughing, plumbing the darkness for light.

  We rubbed lotion onto her hands and feet, each of us pulling lotion from our handbags to do this. Of course we had lotion in our handbags for just such an occasion, for any occasion. “Women.”

  My aunt powdered her, just a bit. She clipped a few strands of her bright white angel hair to keep. When the funeral home came for her body, we waited outside and both of my uncles went in. Please make sure she is handled carefully after all of this. After all of this care. After all of this life. She was wrapped in the sheet she had been lying on, lotioned and powdered, and zipped into a gray flannel body bag.

  We returned to my aunt and uncle’s house around 2:30 a.m., gathered around the dining room table in the dim light, filled short glasses with wine and toasted her. A candle flickered between us on the table. The rest of the world, sound asleep.

  I woke up five hours later, feeling relieved.

  I woke up five hours later, feeling I had loved and not lost.

  I didn’t stay much longer after that. The world rushes by, not caring at all who has gone missing overnight. Life does not wait for the dead and barely pauses for the living. You lose one of the most important people in your life but still there is so much to do.

  * * *

  Back in Vermont, back home, the return to my life felt offensively seamless. I kept forgetting she had died, then I would have to remember it all, all over again. I felt like a disloyal grandchild, an ungrateful human being. The routine of my family and my work swallowed me whole and I was willing to go. I surrendered to the numbness of regular existence.

  * * *

  Five days later, my body surged awake at 2:00 a.m. Life, filling me. The pulse and force of an orgasm, one no one had asked for, filled my consciousness. I plunged my hand under my ratty yoga pants that I had fished out of my bag in the dark the night before, no clean clothes to be found.

  My fingers scrambled under my cotton underpants, the ones that were growing snug from the sundaes we were all eating, thanks to the “I Scream for Ice Cream!” basket my son had won at the most recent school fund-raiser.

  I expected every ounce of pleasure to dissipate the more awake I became, as it so often did. Dew evaporating in the glare of the early-morning sun.

  Instead, it only strengthened. Every slight, quiet movement, another wave. A pit in my stomach. My middle finger slipped farther in, pressing.

 
I thought of heart valves opening and closing, the elongated shape, the snap-shut of their movements, the electrical impulse. Or the esophagus, swallowing, pink and shiny in the glare of a surgical light. This body of openings, of closings, of pathways ignored until they require attention.

  I thought of the first time I had fingers inside of me. We parked in his car after school, on a back road near my house. His car, a half-rusted boat, pulled into a turnoff under enormous pines. Needles fell from the branches and hit, marking our time.

  My bra unhooked, my shirt not even off, no one had time for that. Pants unzipped and shoved down. I thought about how everything we do out of necessity when we’re young becomes something we need to role-play at twenty or thirty years later. When you always have access to a bed and nothing but permission? Spare me. You want to get caught, have no time, who cares if we’re comfortable? Wanting to feel, touch, the pull-off on a dirt road, the driveway of your parents’ house after a party, it never seemed easy, did it? You had to want it, even if you didn’t know exactly what it was.

  I thought of him dropping me off after that, still in the bright light of the afternoon, I walked our dogs, the ache I felt from realizing there was an inside to me, exciting, new. Things were different now, my head pinballing. Each step I took, the ache, a reminder.

  I thought of the first boy I had sex with, who upon finding out I was a virgin made it his unspoken mission to make me not a virgin. He taught me how melting it was to plunge your tongue into someone else’s ear and how hot breath can make you feel like you’ve left your body behind. He also taught me what it’s like to be used and discarded, by dropping me cold the day after we had sex. No phone calls, no notes, no nothing.

  I guess it must be hard to be a big fish in a shallow puddle, watching all your contemporaries move on and have a life. And there you are, feeling the need to dip deeper and deeper into the pool of younger and younger girls to stay relevant. Although you graduated from high school already. Although you were once so cool. And here I am, all these years later, still utterly devoid of sympathy. Sad face.

  I shifted my weight, and pressed harder into my hand, another wave.

  I thought, It’s officially Mother’s Day right now, and I have to even do this shit for myself.

  I thought of the soccer player I had sex with the night of my high school graduation party. He had moved to our town for the summer with his college roommate, a graduate of our high school. He was from England and that accent, Jesus Christ. In our rural Massachusetts, dull-as-shit, white-bread town, here was—well, let’s face it—another white guy. But with an accent! It honestly didn’t take much.

  I never felt good enough for any of the boys in my high school, most of them made sure of that. Not intentionally, not in a cruel way, but in a way that said, “You are literally the only girl in your social circle we have not dated.” But this outsider, this genuine alien to our town, this athletic fox, somehow felt differently. And he felt differently in front of all of them.

  It’s not like I suddenly became the prom queen, it wasn’t quite that big, but it was enough. Fuck you, everyone! People see something in me; he sees something in me. We didn’t date, not officially, because that would’ve been too much. Too visible, too much of an endorsement, too satisfying. But we were together that summer. I’d pick him up from work and we would lounge in my car with the windows down, the lush chirping of the thick summer air surrounding us.

  He ran his hands over my bare breasts, down my stomach, and said, “You have a beautiful body.” No one had ever said that to me before. I’m not sure anyone has said it since. But maybe I just stopped listening a long time ago.

  I thought of the one boyfriend I had in high school who saw me, really saw me. Saw how I was different, saw who I could be, would be. I’m not even sure boyfriend is the right term; it was so fast, our timing off. But I can still remember, thirty years later, parking in his car (there were so many cars) and how good he smelled. I remember his winter scarf and burying my face in it, inhaling. I remember my best friend and I debating, could it be cologne or was it just the laundry detergent his mom used? I still don’t know. I should ask him.

  I thought of the blur of one-night stands and early-twenties really terrible decisions. A long-haired bartender in a pool in Dallas. A client from work who I straddled in public at a shitty bar down the street from my shitty apartment. The barback from the college bar my best friend and I practically lived at; he would sometimes come over after his shift. The next time I saw him, a lifetime later, he was in the “Hot Issue” of Rolling Stone. I thought of the apartments I snuck out of and the people I cheated on or with. I thought of the rug burns and the flowers, the hangovers and the regrets. I thought of the few moments of tenderness. I thought of tall blond Anton who drove a Saab, who had to be almost ten years older than me. The one my roommates and I giggled over and called A Real Man, the shock of his attractiveness in general and attraction to me specifically never went away.

  I remember being so drunk one night that a guy I had met in a bar started to fuck me in his bed even though I was passed out and I woke up, into it enough. Only after he was almost done did I realize his roommate was still in the room, wide-awake, watching. They both knew he was watching. They had probably planned it. I really didn’t care.

  I thought of the thirty-two-year-old I was dating when I was seventeen; I can still remember the monochromatic outfit I wore to the winter carnival dance that night, a blue satin dress with blue stockings—a fashion tip from a mall store, one I might add, that’s surprisingly spot-on all these years later. How I went to his house afterward, how he ran his hands under my dress and up my back, how he stuck his fingers inside me while we stood, while I pressed into him. It never went further than that.

  He would call me at home to see if I could go away with him on a business trip and I’d have to say, “I can’t, I have school.”

  My husband woke up, shifted, got up, and went to the bathroom. I lay there, still. My breath shallow. An alligator at the surface of the water, eyes fixed.

  This wasn’t something I wanted anyone else to finish.

  An hour had already passed.

  I thought of flirting and how much I miss the real thing. The real kind that could lead somewhere. I wonder, What would his hair feel like between my fingers and how would he kiss? I don’t think of fucking anyone else or having affairs, not often anyway. It just feels like a lot of work, navigating each other’s issues and likes and hang-ups. I would just like to kiss more, different people, to remember what being surprised feels like. To remember what different feels like.

  I have been at weddings and funerals, kids’ birthday parties and high school reunions, and inevitably I end up in a conversation with someone I have kissed, a long time ago.

  Sometimes it was more than that.

  We’ll sit there with a drink in our hands and talk about how life is going or how our jobs or kids are and at some point I will inevitably think, You once had your penis in my vagina. And we both know it. You went down on me, I can still see you. I can still taste you. And depending on how long the drinking goes on, there is always an exchange of looks that verifies, yes, we both know it. We have not forgotten.

  I thought of how I never once had sex throughout my pregnancy with my son. I was so afraid of doing anything at all to jeopardize it after having had a miscarriage the year before. And I thought of how I had sex constantly when I was pregnant with my daughter, how blood surged through me and I would wake up in the middle of the night, needing it.

  I thought of when my husband and I got engaged and we went down to our local bar to celebrate (automatically I now think, What did we do with the kids? So foreign is the idea of utter and complete freedom without coverage and favors.) And I immediately launched into, “Well, you should probably know everyone I slept with, because a bunch of them will be at our wedding.”

  I thought about how he didn’t even flinch.

  I thought of my husband’s hands
, big and rough. I thought of his ability to cry, easily. I thought of him not being even a little bit squeamish about periods or having to unclog a toilet I myself have clogged. I thought of love and what that even means anymore, twenty years in. I thought of all the ways I have not deserved it. I thought of all the ways I still do. I thought of how I want to be surprised and loved, grabbed and taken. Flirted with, shamelessly. Cared for, endlessly.

  Another hour, gone.

  My left arm was numb from laying down on it. I slowly pulled my fingers out and they were pruned from being wet for so long. I felt the ridges on them, the dampness of my clothes, the faint smell of fresh sweat on my skin.

  The birds started to chirp, the faint inky blue of the coming morning. Mother’s Day.

  I thought, I have pushed so many of these thoughts down. I have given up so much of what sent blood coursing through my body from the time I was thirteen. I have suppressed the feeling of wrapping my arms around a jean jacket and kissing under a streetlight, tasting a freshly smoked cigarette on someone else’s mouth.

  I have pushed away the notion I am still alive, I have given myself over to raising children and feeling professionally fulfilled and having opinions on The Issues. I have forgotten what it feels like to live and die on a comment, a call, a hand lightly brushing against my arm. The body electric, always lying in wait.

  I thought, in the last hour of this full body rebellion, this reunion of musky memory, Am I returning?

  Did I return from a death to get back to my life?

  I thought, Maybe I’m only halfway through my days.

  I thought, Why am I giving up on myself so soon?

  I thought, I am not ash.

  Not yet.

  Time-Out

  Fifty-One Things You Should Never Say to a Mother Ever

  “Your daughter is so beautiful!” So you’re saying she’s dumb.