When I got back to the kitchen, Debbie was standing by Bobby at the sink. I hadn’t heard her come down, but a basket of dirty laundry sat on the floor, disregarded. She turned when she heard me and made a face. “Bobby’s bleeding,” she said, as if the fact might have escaped my notice.
What was it I saw on their faces in that moment? Nothing that should have been too surprising—two children exhilarated by the sight of blood. They wore identical expressions of guilty excitement, a sudden shared charge moving through the air. Debbie hadn’t been party to Bobby’s injury, but coming upon him alone in the kitchen with blood dripping from his hand, she had stumbled into a scene already in action and none of the explanations immediately evident. It was something different, a whiff of drama. After the long quiet of a morning spent snapping the ends off a pile of green beans, anything approaching an emergency was sure to interest her. Her eyes were bright with it, as were Bobby’s.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, yet for a moment I felt something close to alarm at their stance, the two of them facing me together from the other side of an invisible line. It was that first instance when you understand that your children have already become something separate from you, that there are unknowable parts of them you didn’t even know to wonder about, or fear. The future standing up, overshadowing the present.
It was only a moment. Then I crossed the room to stand beside Bobby at the sink. Taking his hand, I blotted the fresh blood with some tissues I’d brought with me from the bathroom. Then I began wrapping it up with the bandage and tape. Debbie stood watching me, biting her fingernails, and when I was done, she asked if Bobby was going back out to work.
I glanced at the clock. It was a quarter to eleven, and I always had dinner ready by eleven thirty. “Why don’t you stay in here and rest up,” I told him. Turning to my daughter, I said, “You go run and tell Mr. Hughes that Bobby’s going to stay here till dinner.”
Once Debbie had left, Bobby thanked me and then leaned against the counter, looking uncomfortable. I knew he’d rather go back out and help his father, but I had told him to stay, and he was waiting now for me to tell him what to do next.
“Get yourself a glass of water,” I said, “and let’s go see how your mother’s doing.”
“She’s probably sleeping. She sleeps a lot.”
I stepped past him to grab a glass from the cabinet and then handed it to him to fill. “That’s true, but I know she’d be glad to spend a little time with you. Go on and get a drink and let’s go see if we can wake her.”
In the living room, Lydie was sitting up partway with several pillows at her back. It wasn’t a very comfortable position; her lower back was hurting so badly she thought it might be that the cancer had spread to the bones. “What’re you doing coming in so early?” she asked Bobby.
“Cut myself,” he said, not moving from the doorway.
I’d already taken several steps across the carpet and my presence made it all the clearer how far Bobby was staying from the sickbed. I wanted to go over and draw him physically into the room, but I stayed where I was. After a pause, Lydie spoke: “Come over and let me take a look at it.”
Her tone was almost harsh, much more so than usual. She hadn’t ever been the sentimental type, but her voice was naturally soft. Now all that softness was gone, leaving a hollow scrape in its place. I tried to think whether it was that way when she was speaking with me alone and decided that it wasn’t; this was some other way of talking that I hadn’t heard from her before.
Bobby waited a second or two before following her orders. When he came up to her at last he was cradling the injured hand and he held it out for her inspection, gingerly, as if afraid she might grab it and squeeze.
Lydie turned her eyes on the bandaged hand. “You washed it good?”
Bobby nodded.
“And you thanked Mrs. Wisniewski for wrapping it up for you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She leaned back a little and looked at him. Her eyes were flat. “How’d you get yourself hurt?”
He explained to her about the tractor. “I was going to go back out—” He stopped abruptly and glanced at me. Then he looked down suddenly and blushed because it sounded as if he were blaming me for keeping him back.
“I thought he might sit here with you and rest awhile before dinner,” I said to Lydie. “It’s already getting on to eleven.”
She nodded without looking at me. It was quiet for several seconds, and then in the same instant Lydie reached out to take her son’s hand and Bobby turned to look at me. He gave me a pleading look, as if I was the only one who could make this torture end. And because he’d turned away, he didn’t see his mother’s effort. She dropped her hand without touching his. “Go on,” she said sharply when he had turned back to her again. “You go out and help your dad until dinner is ready. And be careful you don’t hurt your hand any worse.”
Bobby breathed out quickly and took off without shooting another glance at me.
Once he was gone, Lydie slid down so she was lying flat with her head on the pillows. She closed her eyes and said in the voice she hadn’t used with her son—the tired one—that she’d be grateful if I would go fix dinner for the boys. Of course, I told her, and walked into the kitchen to start frying up the steaks.
There came a point when Lydie’s dying could no longer be considered a background event. She’d been stationed on the sofa in the living room for more than a month, and with help, she was still able to get up to go to the bathroom. What she needed help with was the standing part. The bathroom was right next to the living room, so she could walk to it on her own by using the arm of the sofa and then the wall for support. But standing up was difficult—the cancer was making her bones weak, and she was afraid of falling and breaking something. So I’d help her swing her feet onto the floor and then I’d sit beside her on the sofa. I’d reach my arm behind her back to grab hold of her waist and she’d lean her shoulder against mine, and then I’d lift with that whole side of my body. I was afraid of hurting her, but she knew how to protect herself; she held her arms in such a way as to shelter her chest.
This was how things went for a time. I knew that George was the one to help her up and down in the evenings after I’d gone home, though Lydie never spoke of it. Then one morning after I’d been sitting with her awhile, she told me she had a favor to ask. She was lying half-reclined with her eyes raised to the top of the window, which showed a view of green leaves, perfectly still. “It’s been over a week since I had a bath,” she said.
“That long?”
She turned to look at me. “You’ve got to have noticed, Hazel. I’m starting to smell.”
I had noticed. For the past two or three days I’d had to will myself not to breathe through my mouth whenever I helped her up from the sofa. I’d seen no reason to mention it. I figured she must know and that it was none of my business to tell her if she didn’t.
“George has been helping me,” Lydie went on. “That little stool in the bathroom—he sets it in the tub and then helps me to sit. I’ve managed, up to now. I send him out of the room and I’ve been able to—to wash myself. I don’t think I can anymore. Last time I almost fell off the stool.”
I stood from my chair. “How about I go run the bath now?”
Lydie nodded. She’d gone back to staring at the top of the window, and I left her like that. While the tub filled, I retrieved a towel and washcloth and a fresh nightgown from the linen closet. I’d been putting her nightgowns there after I took them down from the line because I didn’t want to set foot in George and Lydie’s bedroom. Most of the time, I had Debbie take the laundry upstairs when it was done.
When the tub had collected a foot or so of water, I set the stool inside it and then went back to get Lydie. The leaves outside were moving a little now and I felt the breeze coming in through the screen. “All set,” I said.
“You got a different gown for me to put on?”
“Sure.”
&nb
sp; “A towel?”
“That, too. And a washcloth,” I added.
“There should be a glass on the side of the tub—”
“I saw it.”
“All right, then,” she said, but she still didn’t move.
I waited half a minute. Then, “Lydie,” I said, and she turned to look at me. “It’s all right if this bothers you. But it’s just a bath, you know. You tell me what you need, and we’ll get it done. It’s as simple as that.”
She stared back at me without responding, her eyes fixed on my face with an expression I’d never seen before, one that had a whole bundle of emotions mixed up in it: shame and gratitude and fear and sadness. Or maybe it was only the flicker of understanding that this was the next stage, and surprise that I was going to be the one to take her through it.
I helped her into the bathroom and got her seated on the stool, but her feet were still out of the tub. “Why don’t you hold on to my shoulders,” I said as I pulled off her socks, “and I’ll help you swing your legs around.” I was leaning over, half crouching, and I twisted toward her so she could get a firm grasp on my shoulders. When she lifted her arms the smell got worse, and it wasn’t just the odor from not washing for a week, but a smell like rotting meat. She groaned a little. “Does it hurt?” I asked, and she said yes, it did, like hell.
Once we’d gotten her feet inside the tub, I tugged her nightgown up from under her backside and then began peeling it off her as gently as I could. I knew it hurt to move her upper body in any way, but there was no avoiding it. And I saw what was causing that smell: there were dull red lesions all over her chest. The spots were mostly small and dusty-looking, but in one area they were larger. There were two bandages on her left breast and they didn’t look as if they’d been changed for some time. “Should we take those off while you wash?” I asked after I’d pulled the gown all the way off and dropped it onto the floor behind me.
“Yes, I think so.”
As I peeled the bandages off, I forced myself to talk. I talked about how hot it was and wondered whether we’d get any rain. I talked about how the summer seemed to be stretching on forever and I couldn’t wait for it to end, and though this was a thoughtless thing to say to a woman who might not live to see another turning of the seasons, Lydie didn’t say anything because of course I didn’t mean it that way. I talked and I was careful to make my voice as even as I could. But my heart had started pounding because it was suddenly clear to me that despite the many hours I’d spent in Lydie’s house for the past month, and the many mornings I’d sat reading and talking with her, I hadn’t really known what the cancer was doing to her body. I’d seen her grow thinner and more tired, seen her skin take on an odd luster and her eyes grow dull. But those symptoms could have belonged to any number of illnesses, and the truth of the matter was that I’d been thinking of the cancer as something contained inside her, hidden away in the dark and never to be seen. Now here it was to prove me wrong, and it was angry and evil-looking, breaking out of her skin like some sort of demon. Beneath the bandages were red mounds and craters crusted yellow, bleeding fresh at the edges.
The quicker we got through this bath, I figured, the better. I kept up my steady stream of nothing-talk while I half lifted her from the stool to take off her underwear, and then I took the glass from the side of the tub and began pouring water over her shoulders. She gasped when the water ran over the open wounds, there was no helping it. I asked if she wanted me to do her hair. “It looks something awful without setting it,” she said, “but I guess I don’t need to worry too much about that.”
I put shampoo in her hair and then soaped the washcloth to wash her face. It was peculiar to be looking at her from such a close distance, rubbing the washcloth around her nose and over her cheeks and forehead. Her family used Ivory, like we did, and the smell of it was comforting. Lydie had closed her eyes when I started on her hair and she kept them closed while I was doing her face. But when I stopped to dip the cloth in the water, she opened her eyes and stuck her tongue out at me. That made us both laugh.
I washed her neck, and then her arms and legs. I washed her back and her shoulders and even her hands. At last, there was nothing left but her chest and between her legs. The prospect of washing her chest scared me more because I didn’t know how to clean the wounds. I figured I shouldn’t get soap on them, so I wrung out the cloth in fresh water from the faucet and just tapped gingerly around the red areas on her skin. It made me think of Edith, of her time in the WAC during the war. Surely, she’d washed wounds worse than these—and yet I found it hard to imagine her taking on such a familiar role with anyone. Edith wasn’t the comforting type. Then again, maybe a businesslike temperament was better suited to the task.
I hadn’t stopped talking this whole time because I was too afraid of silence. I’d gone through the weather and what was happening in Murder on the Orient Express and on As the World Turns. I was running out of topics when Lydie remarked that this was the first time someone had bathed her since she was a child. How strange, she said. “Was it your mother who used to bathe you?”
Usually it was Iris or Rena, I said.
“And now, see, I only had brothers”—she sighed—“so my ma was always the one responsible for me.”
I was standing Lydie up now so I could wash between her legs, and it was better to have her talking of things long ago or far away rather than have to focus on that. But the topic of mothers long departed was a dangerous one, and I tried to turn the conversation to baths and how different they were now than they had been a few years ago, explaining how I still found myself thinking I needed to drag out the big tub when it came time for baths at night; we’d finally gotten our indoor plumbing.
“I remember when we got this bathroom put in,” Lydie said dreamily, “and I took that first bath in a tub with clean water. I felt like a queen. There wasn’t any grit at the bottom and no hairs floating around. I don’t believe I ever got to sit in water that clear before. When I was young I always bathed after my brothers, and then I got married and I always went after the boys.”
As I listened, I ran the cloth quickly along the folds at the top of her legs. I’d never been this close to another woman’s privacy before, but it wasn’t so strange. I was reminded of when my children were young, how they didn’t know to be ashamed of anything, and how I’d had to teach them that shame—I remembered slapping Debbie’s hand away from her business when I was giving her a bath. She might have been three years old.
Lydie fell quiet all of a sudden, absorbed in her own thoughts. We were just about finished with the bath, anyway, and I went to help her back down onto the stool to rinse off. That’s when I saw that she was crying. It seemed to have come on quickly, and I asked what was wrong.
She gave me a look like I was a fool, and of course I was. “It’s so ugly,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut and shaking her head. She was a taller and a bigger woman than me, but she looked at that moment as small as a child.
“What is?”
“All of this. I wish I’d come up to it quick instead of day by day getting worse.”
Droplets of water were dripping down from her wet hair onto her shoulders, and I wanted to dry them but didn’t dare move. All the same, I wasn’t sure what to say, so I just kept my hands on her arms, keeping her upright.
Lydie was quiet, soft sobs making her body shake. Then she looked at me and said, “Joe and Debbie are all right.”
It took me a second to figure out what she was saying: it was that my children had lost their father and they were still carrying on. In fact, four years after his death, they barely seemed to be grieving at all. How could I tell her that this made me glad even while it broke my heart? That I imagined them growing older, and their father meaning less and less to them with every year that passed? I wasn’t sure if this was what she wanted to hear, but she’d spoken as if she were asking a question, and I felt compelled to answer: “Yes, they are.”
“That’s good.
It’s what I want for my boys. I don’t want them to miss me long. They’re old enough to take care of themselves, but still young enough to get over it. That’s good,” she repeated.
“There’s no getting over it, Lydie.” I was going to go on, to tell her I thought Gene and Bobby could handle more than she was giving them right now, but she interrupted me with: “Help me dry off, will you?” And that was that.
I patted her dry, and then I got some fresh bandages from the cupboard and taped them on. Lydie stayed quiet throughout the process, and it was only after I’d helped her into a fresh nightgown and led her back to the sofa in the living room that she spoke again. She was out of breath, and as soon as she lay down, her eyes fluttered closed. But I heard her say my name as I pulled the sheet up to her chest and tucked it under her arms. I’d brought a fresh sheet in the day before, but already it smelled off, and I was thinking that tomorrow I’d trade it out for a new one. “Hazel,” she said as all this was going through my mind. “I’ve still got a little ways to go.”
I pulled the sheet so it wasn’t too tight. “Of course you do.”
“But I don’t want them going there with me.”
“Don’t want who?”
“My boys,” she said, her eyes moving a little, as if she was trying to hold my gaze and it kept slipping away. “And George,” she added. Then she explained that she didn’t intend to let her family see her die. “I need you to stay here with me. And I need you to send them away.”
All the air left the room. I dropped onto the edge of the sofa, the little strip of cushion that wasn’t taken up by her body. My hands were still grasping the sheet at her sides. “Where?”
“I don’t know. I’ll leave you to figure that out.”
I released my grasp on the sheet and sat back. Now I was viewing her from a little distance and I saw that her eyes were still searching my face, but the expression in them was something different than I had thought up close. It wasn’t pleading or scared or soft or uncertain. It was clear and it was hard. “When?” I asked, and I could feel my shoulders shaking.
Rebellion Page 52