by Julia Watts
“Listen,” Daddy whispered, his arm draped over Chrys’s shoulder, “I was real sorry to hear about your friend doing you thataway. If she’d been a feller, I’d be half a mind to drag her behind my truck.”
“Thanks, Daddy.” Chrys was genuinely touched to hear her father acknowledge her breakup with Meredith. Like lots of her daddy’s pronouncements, this one had a kind of hillbilly gallantry. He would think nothing of dragging a cheating lover behind a truck, if only she weren’t a woman.
Nanny was in the living room in her La-Z-Boy recliner, wearing one of the floral print shifts she favored at home. “There’s my new roommate!” she called.
Chrys leaned over and kissed Nanny’s cheek. “That’s right. We’re going to get into all kinds of trouble.”
Nanny cackled. “You hear that, Joyce? Chrystal’s gonna lead me down the road to perdition.”
Dustin laughed. “You’uns’ll be partying so hard we’ll hear it all the way down the holler. There’ll be beer cans all over the yard, music cranking.”
Chrys wondered what kind of music Nanny would crank. Gospel, probably, or one of her old Conway Twitty LPs.
The kitchen table was spread with a jumbo bag of off-brand potato chips, a loaf of white bread, a jar of Miracle Whip, and a plate of the kind of “lunch meats” Chrys hadn’t thought of, let alone eaten, in decades: bologna, pickle loaf, olive loaf—all of them strangely pink, smooth, and symmetrical. Thankfully, there was also a stack of individually wrapped American cheese slices, and Chrys elected to forgo her cheese snobbery and make herself a processed cheese-food sandwich. She wasn’t a vegetarian, but she drew the line at eating meat she couldn’t readily identify.
Once they were settled around the table or leaning against the counter with their paper plates and plastic cups of Pepsi or Mountain Dew (or tap water, in Chrys’s case), Nanny said, “There was a time when I’d have been plumb ashamed to serve the likes of this.”
“There ain’t nothing wrong with cold sandwiches in the summertime,” Chrys’s mom said, “and you don’t need to be up on your feet cooking all morning.”
“Besides, it’s too hot to eat much anyhow,” Dustin said, though he was already plowing through his second sandwich. His teenage appetite had never disappeared, and to Chrys’s envy, neither had his teenage metabolism.
“I just wish I had something better to offer Chrystal, is all,” Nanny said, picking at her potato chips. “Seems like with her coming home after all this time we ought to have killed a fatted calf or something.”
Chrys smiled. So that’s what she was—the prodigal daughter. “I don’t eat veal anyway.” She pried the gooey white bread from the roof of her mouth with her tongue. “A cheese sandwich is fine.”
“I like baloney better’n cheese,” Peyton said. She had eaten one half of her sandwich down to the crusts, which she had abandoned. “It’s pink, so it’s princess food.”
Everybody laughed at bologna being such a royal dish. When Chrys and her mom were clearing the table, Daddy said, “When you’re done, punkin, why don’t you come outside with me? Nanny can tell you what she needs help with around the house, but I need to show you a couple of things outside.”
Chrys smiled at how easily her daddy slipped into calling her by her childhood pet name. “Okay.”
“I wanna go outside, too!” Peyton said, jumping up and down.
“Well, come on then, Princess Bologna,” Chrys said. She was gratified when the little girl giggled.
Once they were out on the porch, Daddy said, “Now Dustin’ll come up and mow the grass once a week, so you ain’t got to worry about that. But you’ll need to gather the eggs and feed and water the chickens. You remember how to do that?”
“I just sprinkle the chickens with a watering can, right?”
Peyton giggled again. “Aunt Sissy’s silly!”
Daddy grinned. “No, your Aunt Sissy’s a smart aleck. Always was, even when she was littler than you.”
Daddy took her to the coop and showed her where the chicken feed was kept and how to fill the water dispenser. A red hen roosting in the coop clucked ill-temperedly.
“Now you hush up, Tinkerbell,” Daddy said. “Ain’t nobody gonna bother your eggs right now.”
“The chicken’s named Tinkerbell?” Chrys said.
“Yeah, Peyton names ’em all.” Daddy took out his pouch of Red Man chewing tobacco.
“Uh-huh,” Peyton said, rocking on the balls of her feet. “That’s Tinkerbell, and then there’s Snow White and Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella and Belle. There was Ariel, too, but we ate her.”
“The rooster’s Prince Charming,” Daddy said, stuffing a pinch of tobacco in his jaw.
It was hard to think of anything less Disney-princess-like than these dopey, dumpy chickens, but Chrys had no doubt that Peyton would outfit them all in tiny tiaras if she could.
“So that’ll take care of the chickens,” Daddy said as they walked the path past the coop. “And back here we’ve got Porkchop.”
Lying on his side, snoring through his snout, was a big pink hog. It had long been an annual custom to Chrys’s family to raise a hog which they would butcher in the winter. As a kid, Chrys had always tried to find someplace else to be on butchering day. “And what do I have to do for Porkchop?”
“Just throw him some slop of a morning. Your nanny keeps a bucket in the kitchen for potato peelings and scraps. Just mix that up with some water, and he’ll be happy. Dustin’ll feed him in the evening and clean out his pen, so you don’t have to worry about that.”
“His poop stinks,” Peyton said.
“I’m sure it does,” Chrys said.
“But you know what he likes?” Peyton picked up a long stick, poked it between the slats of the pen, and used it to scratch the hog’s back. In his sleep, he grunted with pleasure.
Chrys knew she’d have a hard time feeding, let alone scratching, Porkchop, knowing his fate. It would be like befriending a prisoner on death row. At least she’d be long gone by the time his execution date rolled around.
Once they were back in the house, Chrys’s mom oriented her as to what pills Nanny took when, what doctor’s appointments she had, when the physical therapist was supposed to come. Soon everybody cleared out so Nanny could nap, and Chrys was left to get settled.
Her room was tiny, just big enough for the maple bed and chest of drawers that had been there since before Chrys was born. On the bed was a worn-thin chenille bedspread which Chrys could remember falling asleep on when she was little. She’d always wake up with the bedspread’s designs embedded in her face. The room’s only decoration was an old, sentimental picture of two children crossing a bridge while being watched over by a guardian angel. The room was as frozen in time as an insect preserved in amber. It was strange being here, even stranger because it was strange and familiar at the same time. She wasn’t sure how she felt about being here yet, but she did know one thing: today had contained the longest period of time that she had gone without thinking of Meredith since D-Day. And that at least was something.
Chapter Seven
When Chrys got up at seven, Nanny was already awake and sitting in her recliner. “You beat me,” Chrys said. “I was trying to be the early bird, but I guess you got the worm.”
“I never can sleep later than six o’clock.” Nanny fiddled with the TV remote. “When Chester was alive, I always had to get up at five thirty to fix his breakfast. Even though he’s been gone more than thirty years, I still can’t break the habit.”
Chrys’s papaw died when she was eight years old. Even though she’d heard her mom comment on his love of beer joints and his hot temper, he’d never been anything other than sweet to her. “And now you’re going to have to get into the habit of me fixing breakfast for you. You’ll have to be patient with me, though. I’m not the cook that you are.”
“Well, I ain’t the cook that I used to be,” Nanny said, smiling at the compliment. “I ain’t the eater I used to be either. Whatever you want
to fix will be all right with me.”
“Breakfast food’s pretty hard to screw up. What do you usually have?”
“Oh, not much. Just coffee, a couple of pieces of bacon, a biscuit or two, and a fried egg flipped over. I never could stand sunny side up eggs…feels like they’re kinda staring at you.”
Since Chrys was usually a cup-of-yogurt-and-a-coffee kind of girl in the morning, Nanny’s breakfast order was daunting. “I’m not sure I can handle the biscuits, Nanny.”
Nanny grinned. “Oh, I don’t mean scratch biscuits. I just make those when I’m feeding somebody besides me. They’s some canned biscuits in the Frigidaire.”
“Those I can handle.”
The kitchen was still decked out in the shades of the seventies: avocado refrigerator and stove, aging earth-tone linoleum, wallpaper printed with burnt orange and harvest gold coffeepots. She rummaged around for a minute, looking for the pans, until the memory of where Nanny had always kept things returned. She put the coffee on, opened the can of biscuits with a satisfying pop, and got out the bacon and eggs. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d fried bacon or an egg for that matter, but she slapped the pans on the stove and hoped for the best. The bacon lay in the pan, limp and pale and unappetizing, until it finally started to sizzle. She broke the yolk of the first egg as soon as she cracked the shell. The second egg’s yolk didn’t break until she tried to flip it in the pan. When the third one broke, she whispered “fuck it” and finished cooking it anyway. She wasn’t going to waste a dozen eggs trying to fry one properly even if the yard was full of chickens.
It took the bacon longer than she’d anticipated to get crispy, and by the time she got the biscuits out of the oven, crispy had given way to burnt. And of course, the broken-yolked fried egg had been done for a while, giving it ample time to grow cold and congealed. She set up a TV tray for Nanny in front of her recliner. “Your breakfast is ready,” she said, “but once you get a look at it, I wouldn’t blame you if you sent me packing back to Knoxville.”
Nanny said, “I’m sure it’s fine, honey,” but when Chrys actually set the plate in front of her, she laughed. “When your mommy and her sisters was little, they always liked to make me breakfast for Mother’s Day. This kindly puts me in mind of what they used to fix.”
“Sorry,” Chrys said.
“Don’t be sorry. You made me remember something nice. Besides, I’ve always been partial to burnt bacon. Why don’t you get yourself something, too? You need to keep up your strength to look after the likes of me.”
“I already feel like I’m not doing a good enough job taking care of you.” She didn’t want to cry, but she felt a telltale tickle in the back of her throat.
“Pshaw!” Nanny said, reaching out to take Chrys’s hand. “Do you know what a comfort it is to have you here with me instead of some stranger who steals my pills? I’d rather have burnt bacon cooked by you than perfect bacon cooked by a thief any day.”
Chrys grabbed a cup of coffee and a biscuit (the one part of the meal she had managed not to screw up), sat in front of the TV, and watched a parade of inanities on the morning show: soft-pedal interviews, watered-down news, low-fat recipes, the weather. Much more entertaining was Nanny’s running commentary. “I don’t think that woman ever draws a sober breath,” she said of one hostess. And then there was “You know, that colored man used to be as big as the side of a house.”
When the show was over, Chrys said, “Now your physical therapist is coming at eleven. I thought I’d go wash the breakfast dishes. Is there anything else I can do to help out before your appointment?”
“Well, I kindly hate to ask you, but it’s gotten hard for me to get in and out of the bathtub by myself. I’ve been making due with sponge baths mostly, but I’m starting to feel like I need a good soaking.”
Lots of Chrys’s students worked low-paying jobs in nursing homes, feeding and washing elderly patients, toileting or diapering them. Chrys was always thankful that there were people in the world who could perform such messy, intimate ministrations, but she had never thought of herself as one of them. If her students could bathe elderly strangers, surely she could manage with her own grandmother. “I’ll go fill the tub.”
“If you don’t care, put some of them Calgon bath beads in it. They’re under the sink.”
As Chrys filled the tub, she tried to look at the bathroom from the point of view of someone with limited mobility. It was a nightmare. There was no shower, just a deep tub. The toilet was in the corner, its low height less than ideal for someone with trouble getting up and down. She adjusted the water temperature from hot to warm and watched as the bath salts turned the water an unnatural shade of blue.
In the living room, she said, “It’s ready, Nanny. Want me to help you up?”
“Just hand me my walker, child.”
“I think it’s funny that you still call me ‘child.’”
“If I can remember when you was a child and I wasn’t a child myself at the time, then you’re a child.” She groaned as she pulled herself up on her walker.
“In that case, I’ll be a child,” Chrys said. “Being a grownup is no picnic.”
“It ain’t,” Nanny said. “And being old’s a downright pain in the hind end.”
“You know what they say, though. It’s better than the alternative.”
Nanny laughed. “There’s something to that, I reckon.” In the bathroom, she seemed suddenly shy. “You think you could help me out of my things?” She lifted her arms like a little kid, and Chrys pulled up her nightgown. “I can take care of the step-ins myself,” Nanny said. “I have a harder time getting them on than taking them off.” She pushed her voluminous white panties down her hips and let gravity do the rest of the work. She cast her gaze down at the floor. “I don’t reckon you’ve ever seen a nekkid eighty-nine-year-old woman before.”
“No, I haven’t.” There was no point in pretending not to notice. She had to pay attention to Nanny’s body to get her into the tub safely.
“Well, this is what you have to look forward to.”
Actually, Chrys thought, Nanny’s body did look like what Chrys’s elderly body might. Nanny had always been on the curvy side like Chrys, but the parts that were still full and rounded on Chrys had flattened and sagged on Nanny. The effect was an overall softening, like an overripe piece of fruit. It lacked the suppleness of youth, but had its own beauty. How strange that the elderly human body was kept so hidden, so mysterious. Young bodies were on display all the time, reminding middle-aged women what they had once been, but there were no images to show them what they would become. “I hope I’m lucky enough to get to have an eighty-nine-year-old body.”
“Well, it ain’t the same as a twenty-nine-year-old body, but any age is a good age to be.” She positioned herself beside the tub. “Usually what I do is set down on the edge of the tub and kindly turn myself around.”
“Okay.” Chrys took Nanny’s arms and helped lower her to a sitting position. The process of getting her turned and lowered into the water was a slow, stop-and-go affair, with Nanny sometimes grimacing in discomfort, but once Nanny was settled, she sighed and said, “Now that feels good.”
“Do you need it colder or hotter?”
“You could make it a little hotter, I reckon. Heat up these old bones.” She looked down at herself. “The women in our family was always filled out. Not fat, just…”
“Voluptuous?”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Nanny said, smiling. “That word sounds kindly dirty, don’t it? Now when Chester and me first got married he always said I had an hourglass figure. But really, he just meant I had big titties and a big hind end. I never had the little waist for an hourglass. If my figure had been an hourglass, the sand would’ve run through a lot faster than an hour.”
“Same here,” Chrys said, laughing. When she was in college, she had gone through a phase of wanting a lithe, athletic figure like the tomboy dykes she was always attracted to. But then
she discovered that the tomboys liked her curves, so she learned to like them, too.
“If you’ll hand me a washrag, I can take care of things from here,” Nanny said. “I’ll just need help when it’s time to get out.”
“How about I check back on you in ten minutes or so? That’ll give you some time to soak.”
Chrys started the breakfast dishes. Seeing Nanny naked and helping her into the tub had been less awkward than she’d thought it would be. She wondered if it was healthier to live in a society where nudity wasn’t so taboo, where seeing friends and family members’ bodies was no big deal, where there was no embarrassment about breast-feeding or skinny-dipping or helping an old lady into a tub. She wasn’t going to become a nudist any time soon—paying for all that sunscreen would get expensive—but still, it was undeniable that turning the multi-purposed human body into a private, sexual thing came at a cost.
It had been a long time since Chrys had washed dishes, and the mindless, repetitive nature of it was strangely soothing. When she lived with Meredith, the dinner dishes would wait in the sink each morning until the maid arrived. It was amazing how quickly Chrys had fallen into the habit of letting someone else clean up after her. Amazing and a little scary.
When Chrys returned to the bathroom, Nanny’s cheeks were flushed pink from the hot water. “Do you need me to help you wash your hair?” Chrys asked.
“No, honey, I get it warshed on Saturday at the beauty shop.”
Chrys had forgotten the old-lady tradition of the Saturday morning shampoo-and-set, which got the coiffure in good order for church on Sunday. She had no problem taking Nanny to get her hair done, but she hoped she wouldn’t have to take her to church. “Are you ready to get out?”
It took a good while to help Nanny out of the tub and into her bra and panties and the pink tracksuit Joyce had bought her to wear for physical therapy. It was the first time Chrys had ever seen Nanny wearing pants. “You never know,” Nanny said, looking down at her athletic gear. “When that feller gets here, he might make me run all the way down the holler.”