The Almost Sisters(59)
13
I put Birchie to bed that night. I had an almost primal need to care for her body, the dear and failing case that held my grandmother.
It had been a long and stressful day. In spite of her nap, her supper conversation was mostly non sequiturs, but Wattie said we couldn’t let her go to bed early. The break in the routine would hurt her more than being so damn tired would.
Wattie and I walked her back to her room exactly as the clock chimed seven.
She stopped dead at her door and put an urgent hand onto my arm. “They’re going to eat the zinnias!”
“It’s okay,” I told her. “We’ll plant more zinnias.”
“They’ll just make more bad rabbits!” she said, her fingers digging into me.
“Do you want to hear crickets or the ocean?” Wattie asked.
Birchie cocked her head, listening to something I could not hear. Her fingers relaxed. “Crickets.”
“She always chooses crickets,” Wattie confided as we went on in. “Making a room sound like it’s filled plumb up with bugs would not put me to sleep, I tell you that much. But she likes those crickets.”
Birchie’s room was a riot of early-summer colors. Her love of the Victorian had fuller rein here than anywhere else in the house, from the sage-green wallpaper with its rampant, flowered vine, to the rich prints on the chairs, to the tufted velvet bench at the foot of the bed. I walked her to her panel bed with its tall, carved headboard. Scrolled dressers in matching cherrywood on either side served as bedside tables. Birchie still called the one by the window “Floyd’s dresser,” though she’d been widowed now for more than half a century.
While Wattie went to the vanity to set up the noise machine, I helped Birchie lower herself to the edge of the bed. Then I knelt before her, sliding her shoes off her feet. She hadn’t put on stockings. Twenty years ago, or ten, if I had suggested she go without her stockings, even here in the middle of June, even wearing this dress that came down to midcalf, she would have asked me if we’d gone to sleep in Alabama and woken up in Babylon.
Her bare feet looked younger than the rest of her. She and Wattie went to Pinky Fingers on the square every Friday and got their feet and hands done. Her heels were buffed smooth, and this week she’d chosen a light coral polish.
Wattie moved to the window, drawing the heavy damask drapes against the lingering summer sun. Now almost all the light came from the soft-light bulb on Birchie’s bedside lamp. She sank down into the chair beside the window with a sigh that told me exactly how tired she was, and from there she talked me through Birchie’s bedtime routine.
First I rubbed Birchie’s feet and calves and hands with her rose petal–scented lotion. I took her bun down, putting her hairpins in the glass bowl on the dresser, and I brushed her long hair. It gleamed moon-colored in the lamplight. The pink of her scalp shone through the thin strands as I braided it for sleeping, letting it hang in a slender tail over one shoulder.
When that was done, Birchie stood and put her hands up like a toddler so I could lift her dress over her head. She wore an old-fashioned full slip, with lace at the top and bottom. I peeled that off her, too. It was so strange to see my grandmother in her large, plain bra and the kind of panties named for her. I was wearing granny panties myself these days, baggy, all cotton, and baby blue in honor of Digby. Birchie’s were seashell pink. I unhooked her bra and helped her out of it.
Birchie looked like a dumpling in her dresses, small and smooth and rounded. Naked, she was made of folds and creases. Her breasts sat low on her chest, deflated, streaked with stretch marks. Her soft lady belly hung down inside her drawers. Her thighs looked like a baby’s thighs, creased and folded, but sadder somehow. The scallops of her legs were not bursting with that good, new milk fat. They were mostly skin, creped and hanging.
I felt such a well of tenderness for this dear old body. Every piece of it proclaimed how tired it was, but it was lovely, too. Her history was written in it, in the stretch marks left by my father, in the surgery scar on her abdomen and the puckered burn scar on the inside of her left arm, in the simple toll of ninety years of fighting gravity. Inside me Digby spun, and my Birchie stood near naked before me, yawning like a child.
She held her arms up again, and I lifted her long, rose-sprigged nightie over her head. Then I took her to use the bathroom, to remove and clean her bridges, and to take her nighttime medication. It was already sorted into a little cup by the sink, and two more pills had joined the ones I knew. There was a yellow-and-orange capsule, garish as a candy corn, and a little blue pill that looked like a bead.
“She didn’t have a baby aspirin,” I told Wattie as we made our slow way back to the bed.
“She takes that in the morning,” Wattie said, peeling the bedding down.
She’d moved the shams to the velvet bench already. I looked at her with new respect, and with apology.
“You do this every night?” I asked. She’d spent the last hour sitting in the window chair, but she still looked flat exhausted. She nodded. “Jesus, Wattie. You should have let me . . .” I trailed off. Hire someone? I’d tried that. Birchie had put a stop to it. Help? I hadn’t known she needed this much help.
Wattie said, “If it was me going first, she’d do the same. Don’t you doubt that.”
I didn’t. Wattie was a small, smooth dumpling in her own loose dress, but the artist in me could see under it. I knew there would be history written deep on her body as well. History I would never know. Birchie knew it, though. They had taken care of each other all their lives, through their girlhoods and marriages and babies and illnesses and losses and secrets.