Grandma’s
Hands
Mattie swallows
the lump in her throat and stares at the yawning casket from across the room.
Everyone else has looked in it already, pausing to kneel and pray. Now they are
all sitting around on couches sipping coffee and whispering. Even Michelle has
coffee, and she’s only twelve. Grandpa has found a chair off by himself. He
sits very still, looking formidable. Mattie thinks about going to him instead
of to the casket, but that would be putting off the inevitable. When she tried
talking to him earlier, at a respectful distance, he had completely ignored
her. His gaze remains stony now, as if examining something off in the distance
that annoys him. She wonders if a “wake” means that you can’t sleep here. What
if she falls asleep later? Would someone make her leave? Maybe that’s why
Grandpa looks so rigid. He might be tired. They sure have some comfortable couches
for a place where you have to stay awake. Yanking on the tight lace of her
collar, Mattie looks around to make sure nobody is watching her. After an
eternity of walking on the red and beige carpet, she is close enough to stand
on tiptoes and peek over the side of the casket.
Grandma’s
hands are the only thing she sees, folded neatly with brown rosary beads threaded
between the fingers. Those same brown rosary beads with the varnish worn off in
places that used to be on Grandma’s dresser. Mattie loved to place them around
her neck when nobody was looking. The crucifix reached the floor so she was
careful to double the string of beads to shorten them. She didn’t want the
crucified Jesus on the beads to be angry or be stepped on. Mattie had enough to
worry about as far as keeping Jesus and God happy with her. She figured you could
only sin so much before they got tired of you.
The hands. Shiny nails sat atop shiny skin,
wedding rings gleaming even in this soft light. Grandma’s hands were never
still like this—they always moved, they crocheted and sewed and made ice cream
and put Band-Aids on skinned knees. They brushed stray locks of hair from
children’s foreheads. They didn’t just lie there like this, holding the rosary
as if they had nothing better to do. Someone in the hallway drops a tray of
coffee cups.
Crash
Mattie sits under
the table in the kitchen, playing with Grandma’s cat, Miss Suzy. Miss Suzy
thinks yarn is the most wonderful thing ever invented. She and Mattie never
tire of the yarn game, and under the table, they both feel safe from grown-up
feet. Grandma washes dishes and stirs a simmering pot of cherry pie filling,
talking to Aunt Margaret who sits at the table with a cup of coffee, chain-smoking
Pall Mall cigarettes. That’s another good thing about being under the table.
The smoke stays mostly up above. Sometimes Aunt Margaret puts one cigarette out
and lights another, but the first one isn’t all the way out and it just sits
there, smoldering. She never even seems to notice, but keeps on talking and
smoking, sipping her coffee with a mini wildfire right in her face. The
smoldering ashes make Mattie think of the snakes they play with on the fourth
of July, the kind of fireworks that kids got bored with but parents got for
free when they bought the real stuff. Then they acted like they got something
special just for the little ones. Whoopdie-doo.
“Mattie,
I’ve got a sandwich ready for you.”
Mattie
springs from beneath the table, spooking Miss Suzy into running behind the
couch in the parlor. “Can I eat it on the steps?”
“Of
course.”
She
scampers out the kitchen door, through the mud room, to the back steps where
she sits, sandwich in hand. Grandma had made the pickles that sat on the plate
by the sandwich, in mid-summer when the garden was in a full riot of vegetables—tomatoes,
cucumbers, onions, and rhubarb. Grandma had picked and sliced the cucumbers,
boiled them in vinegar and canned them with her own hands.
Someone in the
kitchen drops a dish and it shatters.
Crash
Mattie sits
under the table in the dining room. Miss Suzy is nowhere to be found on this
day. The weather is bitter cold and frost edges the windows, making everything
outside seem like a smear of itself. Miss Suzy likes to stay near the furnace
in the basement in the winter. There are mice down there too. Mattie plays with
her doll. When she had opened the package two years before on Christmas
morning, ecstatic to find the doll she had yearned for in the store, her mother
told her that the name of the doll, printed on the box, was Miss McGoo. Mattie
couldn’t read and she hadn’t been able to pronounce it. The doll had been
Mushy-Goo ever since. Mattie talks to Mushy-Goo about the man that her mother
is out on a date with that night. “His name is Milo and he has glasses and a
funny beard. He has a rumbly voice like Santa Clause. I think Mommy likes him
because she giggles a lot when he is around. He gave me a stuffed tiger but the
tiger is not as pretty as you are.”
Grandpa sits at
the head of the table, listening to a baseball game on the radio. He watches
the same game on the TV in the living room. He hates the TV commentators, so he
listens to the announcers on the radio instead. Occasionally he moves to the
living room, turns on the television sound, and eventually begins to rant about
the idiots who announce the games on TV. Then he shuffles back to his chair in
the dining room and turns the radio back on. Mattie hears the inevitable clink
of bottles as Grandpa puts an empty in the cardboard case next to his chair.
“Sarah!” he shouts. Grandma comes in from the kitchen with a cold bottle of
Budweiser, opens it with a bottle opener from her apron pocket, then goes back
to the kitchen. Little is said between them.
Later, Mattie
lies on the cot in the sewing room. It’s St. Patrick’s Day and the snow has not
melted yet. Grandma goes to bed early, but Mattie can see Grandpa through the
doorway, still sitting at the dining room table, but now the radio plays music.
Old timey music that Mattie doesn’t like. I
can’t stop loving you . . . croons a Lawrence Welk type of choir. Grandpa
sings along unintelligibly, his head nodding forward now and then. In front of
him lies an ashtray, a pack of cigarettes, a zippo lighter, and four unopened
bottles of beer. He clutches an opened bottle in his left hand. Sometimes he
misses his mouth when he takes a drink and he gets angry.
The song
changes. Crazy arms that long to hold
somebody new. Grandpa raises the fist that clutches the beer and hurls the
bottle at the wall.
Crash.
Mattie opened
her eyes, and for less than a moment the hands folded neatly in the casket hold
life—they have color and they are about to do something—anything. Mattie stares and stares, willing those hands to reach
out and brush the lock of hair across her forehead that never stays put. She
closes her eyes and prays that just one more time she can feel Grandma’s hand
caress her cheek to silently say I love
you. She prays that just one last time she can see that index finger
scolding Aunt Margaret for swearing in front of the children. Grandma always
said it that way, “the children,” even when there was only one child there. But
then the hands go right back to being the waxy things they are. She slouches away from the
casket, past her older cousins where they fight with their own too-tight
collars, Styrofoam coffee cups poised beneath red-rimmed eyes. Mattie slithers
into Grandpa’s lap. She is the only one small enough to still do so. Together
in silence, they finally cry.
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