“I can only stay until Wednesday, Thursday at the latest.” Celeste tucks a lock of her thinning hair that’s fallen from her chignon behind her ear. It’s obviously been freshly bleached and looks so brittle that I wouldn’t be surprised to see it lying all over the floor instead of attached to her head that looks too big for her body.
“Audition,” Celeste explains.
Which means she has to work at the department store. Sister language.
I stir the sugar in the bottom of my cup. “Birdie says Mom Brodie needs to be bathed. I told her we’d do it.”
Celeste frowns, although it’s hard to tell; Botox, I suspect. Or cryogenics. “Birdie can’t do it?”
“I thought we would . . . so she doesn’t have to.” I cut my eyes at Celeste. “You know how the two of them are. I think Mom Brodie would be as embarrassed as Birdie, if she knew. I thought we’d spare them both.”
Celeste’s now looking at me as if I’ve grown a unicorn horn from the center of my forehead. “We’re supposed to bathe her, like in the tub?”
“Not in the tub.” I blow on my coffee and take a tentative sip. Even with the cream and sugar, I suspect it would take the paint off the peeling front porch steps. “Not in the tub. Just a sponge bath.”
“Crazy question. If she’s dying, why does she need a bath?”
I try not to be irritated with Celeste, not in the first five minutes I’m with her. I know she’s not exactly a nurturer, but I was hoping for a smidgen of compassion. “I can do it.” I take another sip of my coffee/paint remover. “You look like you could use a nap.”
She sighs. “Fine. At least let me finish my coffee.”
I lean back in my chair, my fingers around my warm mug. “Deal. Now tell me how Daddy is.”
* * *
Birdie’s still not home when I fill the plastic pink washbasin I found in a “patient’s belongings” bag with warm water. In the same bag, I find liquid soap. From the linen closet upstairs, I’ve fetched a washcloth and a couple of towels. I don’t really know how to give a comatose person a sponge bath, but how hard can it be?
Harder than you would think. I realize that when I stand over Mom Brodie’s bed, looking down at her. It’s such an intimate thing, to bathe an adult, the elder you’ve loved and admired and adored your whole life. And humbling. It’s a humbling thing.
She looks very peaceful . . . and still a little dead. So I just stand there, looking down at her.
“You could just tell her we did it,” my sister suggests. She was out on the back porch smoking a cigarette while I prepared the bath. I can smell the smoke lingering on her clothing. Celeste lives on coffee, cigarettes, and vodka.
I ignore her and lean over the bed. “Mom, it’s Abby,” I say softly. “I’m going to wash you up, okay? And then . . . you’ll feel better,” I add lamely.
She doesn’t answer. But she keeps breathing.
I feel a little shaky as I fold back the sheet and blanket to expose her withered body.
“Birdie steal that hospital gown?” Celeste asks, remaining in the doorway.
“Believe it or not,” I say, dipping the blue washcloth into the warm water, “the church has a bag of them members can borrow for home health care.” It’s Brodie Island. We don’t do nursing homes. We take care of our own.
“So what you’re saying is that someone probably already died in that thing.”
Sometimes my sister’s funny. Sometimes she crosses the line. She hopped, skipped, and jumped over it this time.
I ignore her and give my attention to my grandmother. I start with something easy: her face and then her arms and hands. As the minutes tick by, I relax. Even though her skin is thin and wrinkly, I don’t feel like this is any different from washing a newborn baby. A sleeping baby. I find myself glad I can do this for her. She certainly washed my naked body and my bare butt many a time.
When I roll down the gown to wash her breasts that barely resemble breasts anymore, it makes me think about the life she’s led. I don’t know a lot about her days growing up; she never wanted to talk about it. I always wondered if she had a skeleton in her closet, like had her father been abusive, or had she been born out of wedlock? I’ll never know now. What I do know is that she was born in Indiana to wheat farmers, an only child. She was a young girl during the Depression. She lived through the stock market crash, and more wars than I can count right this second. She met my grandfather at a Methodist tent revival in 1933, and he asked her to marry him that first night. He brought his eighteen-year-old bride home to Brodie Island. She had enough miscarriages that she didn’t know how many. She’s lived long enough to see her husband and every friend she ever knew die.
And this will be me someday, I think, gently stroking the fragile skin at her collarbone. If I’m lucky.
When I reach her waist, I fold the cotton hospital gown back up to cover her, for modesty’s sake, even though it’s just us girls here. I’ll get her a clean gown later. I fold the hem of the hospital gown up to her waist above her Depends. As I dip the washcloth in the warm water, I glance at my sister, who’s still standing in the doorway, as if keeping an eye out for Birdie while we have a smoke. Of course, when we were kids, it was Celeste smoking, and I was standing watch. I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life, and only a couple of joints. I prefer the vice of a good pinot noir.
“Sarah come?” Celeste asks, averting her gaze. It’s interesting that our grandmother’s body makes her uncomfortable. There was a time in her life when she’d sleep with anything with a Y chromosome. And did.
“Yup. Still asleep. She got permission from her field hockey coach to miss practice all week.”
“No school?”
“Not until after Labor Day.”
“Ah. Reed gone back to college?”
“Never came home this summer, except to get the futon out of the basement. And his bonsai tree. He and his friends rented an apartment in Philly. They had to sign a year lease, so they decided they might as well move in. He has a summer job in the bio department, a lab thing.” I don’t bore her with the details of the neuroscience research he’s working on at UPenn. It wouldn’t mean anything to her, and she’d start a conversation about my brainy son needing to live a little, find a girlfriend, sow his oats.
I dip the washcloth into the warm water, wring it out, and slide the sheet down to expose my grandmother’s bird legs. And that’s when I see it, high on her thigh. For a moment I just stand there, washcloth poised in my hand, midair. “Celeste,” I say, unable to look away. “Did you know Mom Brodie has a tattoo?”
6
Celeste
“Holy shit.” I stand next to Abby and stare at the skeleton in the bed. Mom Brodie doesn’t even look like a human. She looks like one of those creatures that comes out of the tomb in The Mummy, with Brendan Fraser, back when he was skinny and hot. The first movie. Not the others. They sucked.
“That is a permanent tattoo, right?” Abby whispers.
“Well, I don’t think it’s done with a Sharpie marker.” I turn sideways to get a better look, butting my pretty, perfect big sister out of my way. She drops the washcloth into the washbasin, and I hear it splash.
“That’s definitely a tattoo.” I’m fascinated and horrified at the same time. I wish I had my reading glasses, but they’re hidden in the depths of my overnight bag. I never wear them in front of anyone, not even my family. “It . . . it’s a garter I guess.”
“A garter?” Abby repeats.
“Yeah.” I point, but I don’t touch it. Touch her. I swear she looks dead, and I don’t do dead. I can barely manage living. “You know, like in the old days. To hold up your silk stockings.”
I can’t take my eyes off the tattoo, even though the skinny, fleshy thigh creeps me out. (Maybe because it looks a little too much like my flabby thigh.) It’s a good tattoo, done by an artist, not by a friend one night when everyone got too drunk. I know those tattoos. I’ve got a fairy on my butt cheek that kind of looks like a gargo
yle now.
“Mom Brodie has a tattoo?” Abby says, sounding as if she might cry.
“Mom Brodie has a tattoo?” Sarah bursts into the room. “And nobody told me? Why doesn’t anyone ever tell me these things?” she demands. She seems pissed to be left out of the loop, and excited about the tattoo at the same time.
My sister cuts her eyes at me. “I don’t think you should have told her.”
“Told her!” I roll my eyes. “I didn’t tell her anything. She was eavesdropping.”
“I wasn’t eavesdropping,” my gorgeous goddess teenaged niece tells me. She looks at her mother. “Mom, I was not eavesdropping. You know that’s not my style. I was just walking down the hall.” She gestures with her slender hand. “And I hear Celeste say loudly ‘that’s definitely a tattoo.’ If you say it loud enough for other people to hear, that makes it public knowledge.”
“I’ve asked you. Call her Aunt Celeste,” Abby says.
“And I told her to call me Celeste. I don’t like that ‘aunt’ stuff.” I tug on the hem of the teen’s T-shirt. “She can’t tell you what to call me. She’s not the boss of everything.”
My sister opens her mouth to say something, then closes it and looks down at our hundred-plus-year-old grandmother again. “Mom Brodie has a tattoo,” she says, still sounding as if she doesn’t believe it, even though we’re all staring at it.
“Right,” I say with just the right intonation, the way young people do. I’ve been working on word choices, trying not to say things that date me, like cool and neat. I’ve almost got the “yeah, yeah, yeah” down pat.
“It’s beautiful,” Sarah breathes, standing between us. She’s braver than I am. She reaches out and runs her finger along the ruffle of the garter, which I want to do, but it scares me. Old people scare me in general, the way they smell, the way they look at you, the way they seem to know your worst thoughts. All your failings. And Mom Brodie was as good at that as anyone I’ve ever known. Not that I know a lot of old people. Like I said. They creep me out.
“How long do you think she’s had it?” Sarah whispers in breathy awe.
I fluff up my bangs, hoping they can’t see the bald spot on the right side of my head that’s widening. “She sure as hell didn’t get it on Brodie,” I say.
It might be one of the most beautiful tattoos I’ve ever seen. It’s a ruffled garter, three quarters of the way up her thigh, in pale blue, not the ugly green ink you usually see in old tattoos. My guess is that it was once a navy blue. There are two little birds, with curly ribbons in their beaks, weaving them around the garter.
“They’re bluebirds,” Sarah says, speaking with such reverence that you’d think we were in a damned church. “Does it go all the way around?”
Abby looks at me. I put up both my hands. I’m sure as hell not picking up Mom Brodie’s skinny leg to look. I’m not touching her. I don’t care how much money she’s leaving me.
My sister reads my thoughts.
“Let’s have a look,” Abby says. She lifts Mom Brodie’s leg at the knee, bending it, and ducks her head to look.
I’m going to take her word on it.
“It goes all the way around,” she says. “And there’s another bluebird.” She gently straightens out our comatose grandmother’s leg.
Sarah looks down at her mother, a carbon copy with the red hair, only taller and prettier, if that’s possible. “But how did she get it?” she breathes. “When?”
“Sure didn’t get it in the last decade,” I say. “Or last eight.” I look at my sister. “She had it when she came to Brodie. Had to have.”
Sarah wrinkles her freckled nose. She’s covered with freckles, the kind that cluster in patches across her nose and cheeks. Very chic. She says she wants to be a physical therapist, but she could be a model. She’s got legs that go on for a mile. And her pale face with that blaze of freckles across her nose and cheeks . . . beyond amazing. She could do runway couture.
“But you said she was a child bride. She married Great-Grandpop when she was eighteen,” Sarah says.
I shrug. I need a cigarette. And possibly a drink. I’m hoping Joseph will meet me for lunch at The Gull. I already texted him, but he hasn’t texted back. I need the dirt on Mom Brodie’s will. Abby won’t want to talk about it. She’ll be all righteous and say we shouldn’t discuss it, not with Mom Brodie on her death bed. But honestly, what does it matter? Mom Brodie’s going to die. It’s not like us talking about it is going to make it happen any faster. And I know very well we’re in her will because, five or six years ago, a legal secretary called from Clancy Jacobs’s office, the only attorney on the island, to get my mailing address. Her name was Tootsie or Tootie or something like that. She said “Mr. Jacobs was doing some work for Miss Sarah.” There’s only one Miss Sarah on Brodie Island, at least whose name is said like that, like you’re saying Princess Di or something. Mom Brodie was writing her will, all right (which was about freakin’ time since she was already in her nineties), and I’m in it. I just need to know how big I’m in it.
“I’d lay ten to one, Mom Brodie had that when she married Pop Brodie.” I chuckle at the thought. “Pop Brodie thought he was getting some sweet little Methodist virgin and what he was actually getting was a little minx.”
Abby cuts her eyes at me again. Obviously she doesn’t like the idea of her saintly Mom Brodie possibly being anything but what Abby has built up in her head over the years. She doesn’t know as much as she thinks she knows. Like the fact that it was Mom Brodie who paid for my abortion when I was in the eleventh grade. (And a couple more when I didn’t tell her what the money was for.) Or about the picture of the young woman in a feathered bathing suit Mom Brodie kept taped inside the silk lining of her Bible. I found it looking for money once. Old people always hide money in Bibles. And cookbooks. Birdie used to keep her pin money in a Betty Crocker Cookbook until she caught me snitching it. I asked Mom Brodie who the girl in the picture was. She said a friend, but it had to be her. To wear a bathing suit like that in those days was not an everyday thing. (And made of feathers? Who wears feathers swimming?) So the sweet Methodist virgin Pop Brodie thought he married, wasn’t, and Mom Brodie’s got the racy tattoo to prove it. It occurs to me that she might even have one on her butt, but there’s no way I’m looking for it.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” I say. “She got it before she got married.”
“So Pop Brodie knew she had it?” Sarah breathed.
I shrug again. “Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows? That generation did it with the lights out.”
My sister throws me a disapproving look.
“What?” I walk away from the bed, losing interest in the tattoo. “You’re kidding, right?” I ask my sister. “You think she doesn’t know people have sex?” I lift my chin in the direction of her daughter. “Please don’t tell me you haven’t had the talk with her.”
“Of course she knows about sex,” Abby answers, a little snippy. “I just think it’s . . . inappropriate to talk about our grandmother’s sex life . . . in front of her.”
“What? Her?” I point at Mom Brodie. “She’s in a coma. She doesn’t hear a thing.” I shake my head. Abby might be the smartest person I know, but she sure can be stupid. “She’s already gone, Abby. Her body just hasn’t caught up with her head yet.”
Abby turns her back to me and carefully covers Mom Brodie with the blue sheet. “I don’t think we should say anything about this to anyone.”
“You mean Birdie?” I ask from the doorway, giving a laugh. I’m headed out for a cigarette. I might try to hold off on the vodka a while longer. It’s early, even for me. “That would be rich, wouldn’t it?”
Abby sighs. Apparently the bath is over because she’s tucking Mom Brodie in like she’s a baby going down for a nap. “Obviously Mom Brodie didn’t want us to know about the tattoo; otherwise, she’d have told us about it. Or showed it to us.”
Sarah, who’s now standing between us, nods. “I agree with Mom. We shouldn
’t tell anybody, at least not yet. Not until we know more about it.”
“Know more about it?” I make a face. “How are you ever going to know anything? She’s the only one who knows.” I point to the sleeping queen of everything. “And I’ve got news for you two. She’s not talking.”
Sarah turns to her mother. “Maybe I can find something on the Internet. There’re hundreds of sites about tattoos. Lots of pictures, about the history and stuff.”
“And how do you know that?” Abby asks.
Sarah looks at me—as if I’m going to save her—then back at her mom. “You can Google anything, Mom.”
I smile. Good save. Sounds like she might have been tattoo window-shopping. So maybe my niece isn’t quite as angelic as she seems.
“I’m serious. Don’t tell Birdie. Or Daddy.” Her patient tucked in, Abby picks up the washbasin.
“I’m having a cigarette.” I head down the hall.
“I’m not kidding, Celeste!” my sister hollers after me.
7
Sarah Agnes
No one notices us at the carnival. I told Cora we wouldn’t get caught. She still cries all the way home. She has to wipe her runny nose with the hem of her dress before she goes in the house.
I stop at the library after I leave Cora. When I get home, no one asks me where I’ve been. Not Grandmother, or my aunt, and certainly not Mrs. Hanfland. It will be years before I realize no one asked because no one cared, but when you’re fourteen years old and you’ve never been anywhere or done anything, you don’t necessarily see things for what they are. Especially when it comes to love. I’ll learn that lesson, too.
With the tiny, battered book I got at the library, I go to the attic. I don’t have a bedroom of my own anymore. I used to in our old house. Now I sleep on the couch in the parlor. I don’t even stop in the kitchen to eat my supper. It’s boiled turnips and cornbread. Last year’s turnips that are getting wrinkly. No butter, no milk. I hate turnips, and I hate cornbread without drippings or butter or jam. It’s like eating bricks of sawdust.
What Makes a Family Page 5