Grand-Anna
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Us kids
called her Grand-Anna when she was thirty-two. She started walking slower and
began to forget her keys in the shower, the sink, and twice in the toaster. She
wrote letters to relatives as if they were friends and asked her friends over
for weekly bingo night.
I walked in on her one time in the
bathroom and she did not object. She only glanced up from her Chicken Soup for
the Soul reader and told me not to be embarrassed.
I started
to wash the grit out of the creases in my fingers. My brother Matthew was using
the other sink after our foolhardy adventures outside. When I glanced up in the
landscape mirror I saw Anna still looking at me over her reading glasses – not
bifocals, not yet.
I mumbled
an apology for interrupting her private time. I promised it would only take
another minute. Even with the moisturizing soap my too-long nails scratched
lines into my red palms.
“I don’t
care who sees me anymore,” she said, taking me by surprise. And I was the one
wearing pants. “This body of mine has been through enough. It should be in a war museum.”
“Don’t say
that,” I murmured. I did not want to look at her directly, but I did. She was
smiling, as I thought she would be. I guess I just needed an excuse to look at
her deeply bronzed and wrinkled skin.
“It’s
true,” she said. “I put it through hell.”
Hell was a
bad word in our household. My breath hissed out, as if it was a charm that
would banish the consequences brought by that word.
She must
have heard my sharp exhale, because then she said, “What else can you call
neglecting proper sun protection and watching middle school children run their
mile? It wasn’t enough that I hardly took a day’s vacation, but I took the odd
summer hours up at the point.”
I had
probably heard this story a million times, about how she was a P.E. teacher and
a lifeguard in the overflow season at the beach.
Somehow I
asked this time, “Did you swim at the beach a lot?”
“Swim a
lot? It seemed all I was doing was swimming.” Her hands dropped onto her knees
and she leaned forward, as if she was ready to go there now. “A full two weeks
before the season started I would have to go out every day at five a.m. and
train my muscles up. That way, when someone got into trouble going too far out
in that massive surf – and they always went too far out – I could get them and
bring them into safety.”
Her eyes
shone brightly as she relived the past.
“You miss
swimming,” I stated. My hands were dripping all over mom’s new rug. I wrapped
my scratched and clean hands in the dry towel hanging on the drawer.
“Yes,
especially in the mornings.” Her forehead wrinkled as a thought crossed it. Grand-Anna
glanced out the window at the magnolia tree that would soon have to come out
because of a persistent fungus. “But thank God for airbags.”
We had
heard about her accident, of course, from the pieces of her letters that Mom had
read to us before Grand-Anna came to visit. But the notion of a horrific car
accident seemed distant, as a historical event of the kind that never touched
our lives in any lasting way. It was always “Help your auntie up the stairs –
her knees don’t bend like they did before the accident,” or “Don’t stare too
long at her scars.”
Us kids knew where the scars came
from, but not how they got there. We did not know what they meant.
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