#because my fifteen minute digital sketch of my brother from last year that does not even feel good or like my art to me has been Framed

[chiropteracupola]

once again experiencing the kind of grim misery that comes of being an artist at the Gifts Time because the amount of presumed value I put on my art is reallyreally different than that which other people put on it. also the kind of things that I can knit fast with stuff I already have are things that zero people in my family desire.

[cskiner]

Floyetta

           A few months ago, my mother texted me while I was at work—pray for your grandmother, she said. To an outside audience, this would seem a vague and ominous phrase, but to me it was not. My grandmother was not a nice woman. She was rude to my mother and worse to my father, who was her second of two sons. Perhaps she blamed him for her divorce from my grandfather when my father and his brother were very young; more likely, she decided my ten-year-old uncle would be the new patriarch, and wrapped in her own tragedy, could only thinly love one man and bestow guilt upon the other. My mother avoided her as often as she could. My uncle’s wife only referred to her as “the mother,” the corners of her lips curling downward in distaste when the phrase had to be uttered. My grandmother was not a nice woman.

The text message, my mother showing any level of compassion for her mother-in-law, meant that my grandmother might die.

           I took the call at work, stepping out for the fifteen I never used. I did not like my grandmother, but that does not mean that I did not love her. My dad told me on the phone that she had fallen at home and broken her hip, and that during hip surgery her heart stopped. She was resuscitated, but lost several liters of blood and broke a rib in the process. Plus, her hip was still broken, but she was much too weak to undergo a second surgery tonight. They would have to try again in a few days.

My parents were living in New Zealand. My aunt and uncle were vacationing in Maui. My cousins that had not recently been alienated by my grandmother’s biting insults were busy holding down their father’s business. My older brother lived in the Bay Area and had just started a new job that he could spare little time from, and I, in Los Angeles, was the closest to my grandmother’s hospital in San Diego. I hated this hospital. My other grandmother, my beloved Lola, had died there a few years ago from an unexpected brain bleed, and my family had slept in the waiting room for days before her heart stopped. I wanted to throw up, but Fridays at work were thirteen-hour shifts, and I was only nine hours in.

           My dad called me during hour twelve for an update: grandma was stable for the night. I told my bitch of a boss that I might have to take the weekend off, attempting an appeal to sympathy with an excuse I once promised myself I would never use: “my grandmother is dying.” She made me stay late at work that night.

           I downed more whiskey, neat, than usual at my boyfriend’s house that night while crying into his arms. Not for my grandmother—for myself, for the unfair circumstances that had thrust me into adulthood sooner than I wanted. We packed overnight bags and were on the road early the next morning. Will distracted me on the drive down with stories of his grandmother to counter my own—she moved in with his family when he was a teenager and brought her own elderly chaos to the household. I explained a little more about grandma to give him context about her self-pity.

           My grandmother was named Floyetta. Not because my great-grandparents liked the name, no—because her father had wanted a boy to name after himself, a Floyd II. Having a girl instead apparently wasn’t reason enough to look through the baby book for a different name. Her mother, Frances, who I knew until she died at age 99, was a frivolous and inexplicably happy woman. She loved everything pink, wore only muumuus, ate only fine steaks and sugary sweets, and let her poodle sit in a high chair at the dinner table. Her love for this poodle was so strong that when her husband died of liver failure (alcoholism was the true culprit), she drafted a will, expecting that she wouldn’t live much longer. The will left almost everything to her poodle, rather than her daughter, a struggling single mother. When Frances did live for twenty more years, my grandmother moved her in and took care of her day in and day out, feeding her by hand when she lost her teeth. Telling her story, I began to remember why my grandmother was not a nice woman.[Office1] 

           I remembered insults she had spat at my cousin, Andrea, about Andrea’s mother being at fault for her father’s infidelity. I remembered hearing that she tried to get out of my dad’s car while he was driving her home on the freeway, and he had to lock the doors so that she couldn’t tumble out. I remembered that she threw a fit when I was eight because when she vaguely implied dehydration, I brought her too much water. That she “accidentally” called and admonished me for forgetting to call her during finals week at college. That my mother refused to tell me why she almost never came with us to visit my grandmother: I was too young to hear. But she was family. I was her only available support system. It was an obligation, rather than a favor—she had not exactly been our family’s ‘rock,’ but I went anyway.

           When we reached the hospital, I braced myself, but not enough. In her hospital gown and twenty pounds lighter than when I last saw her, grandma looked like Frances had right before she died. The resemblance shocked me back into my twelve-year old body, visiting my withering great grandmother Frances at the hospital and following the nurse’s instructions to douse my forearms in hand sanitizer. Dismal beeps from heart monitors echoed down the hallways and I counted the tiles on the floor to avoid glimpsing other sick patients. The hospital smelled like sterile death and I wanted to get out.

Will steadied me, holding my hand with an iron grip he had never deployed before. I tried to feed grandma her pain medication, crushed into a few tablespoons of vanilla yogurt. She refused after one spoonful (one was impressive, really—she’s not known for cooperating) and we switched back to the tiny sponge soaked in apple juice. It was clear that she was not faking the pain the way she used to. I was disarmed. Grandma’s refusal to do anything productive had always made me angry, indignant at the very least. Now, it just made me sad.

           Will found the nurse and asked her if they could increase the pain medication or try a different kind while I held back tears in the corner, fighting the urge to bolt. He knew all the specific terms, all the alternatives to suggest. He was authoritative but not rude to the nurse and asked the doctor all the questions I had forgotten.

Will had not met my grandmother before this, and I had told him very little about her in the last year that we had been together. I knew family was important to him, but he was not the first man I’d heard that from. My last boyfriend broke up with me because his mother told him to—the wrong kind of “family was important to him.” Will, on the other hand, had voluntarily become my miserable grandmother’s healthcare advocate because the look on my face was telling him, I want to, but I can’t, and somehow he understood.

After a few hours, grandma fell asleep. I sat with her awhile, squeezing her hand when she woke up. Once, she woke up and couldn’t see me; I was on a bench by the window rather than the chair by her bedside.

“Where is my granddaughter?!” she mustered the loudest voice she would use all day, panicked. I rushed to her side and waited until she fell asleep again.

She really loves you, Will mouthed. I know, I responded through tears. I remembered that when she could drive, she did not miss a single one of my dance performances. Last spring, she showed me pictures that she took on her digital camera when I got my first pair of pointe shoes at age ten and refused to take them off, walking them around the house until I had blisters.

Grandma’s grandchildren were the closest thing she had to pride and joy, if she had any. She boasted our accomplishments to anyone who would listen, although in a way that made us feel a little more like circus animals rather than precious grandbabies. A portrait she sketched of my brother around age twelve is still framed in my parents’ house. Grandma spent months on it, trying to get his nose just right. Her artwork was beautifully meticulous, detailed beyond necessity, and realistic in a way that made me wonder why her own reality was so skewed—but it never left her bedroom. She had a habit of mastering things that never turned into practical skills. She told me last year that she finished law school after her divorce, but never took the bar exam. She didn’t have an explanation as to why—or if she did, she wouldn’t tell me.

Grandma fell asleep again during her second very slow blood transfusion, and an old friend came in to watch her for the evening, promising to send us updates. Will stood beside me as I looked at grandma one more time, thinking it very well may be the last, and steadied my shaking hand again to lead me out of the hospital. When my parents flew home to visit grandma a week later, my mother noted that when grandma recounted my visit, she remembered Will vividly, but forgot Andrea’s boyfriend of five years.

Leaving the hospital, Will and I realized we had not eaten anything all day. Dinnertime was quickly approaching, and in my hunger and shock I had fixated on one option: a sandwich shop called Cheese Shop in La Jolla. My parents had taken my brother and me to Cheese Shop every summer when I was a child—they had both grown up in the San Diego area, and La Jolla was about in between their families’ homes. Every summer until we could no longer afford it, we stayed a week at a hotel on the La Jolla Shores, from which Cheese Shop was only a three-minute walk down the beachfront. The taste of deli sandwiches permeates these memories strongly: I would always throw out the pickle and revel in the extra four slices of cheese that I was never allowed at home.

My father would take me with him to the deli for eccentric root beer bottles, turkey avocado club sandwiches, and the best oatmeal cookie that the world has ever seen. We wandered through the selection of European chocolates and came home with more sweets than sandwiches, and one summer I drank myself sick on vanilla cream sodas. Surfers in their towels tracked in sand so that we could smell the ocean in the sandwich shop. We lugged our haul back onto the beach, where I demolished my sandwich and then plunged right back into the waves for a stomachache.[Office2] 

Will and I plugged Cheese Shop into the navigation system, and even though it was almost an hour away, my mind was blank for food alternatives anywhere nearer. He asked no questions.

My father and I bonded over our obsession with Cheese Shop sandwiches, a bond that I rarely felt we had despite our very similar dispositions. I couldn’t help but think it would be strange to visit the deli without him, but I felt a strange sort of compulsion to go, and an even stronger compulsion to show Will this landmark of my childhood. Though we had only been together about a year, I felt this way about him often, as though I could share everything good and never lose ownership of my secrets. He displayed a very similar compulsion when we visited his hometown last month, showing me all his hidden passageways and the boy scout summer camp he loved so dearly.

Arriving at the little shop on the beach, I exhaled for the first time since leaving the hospital. Will humored me by raving about his pastrami sandwich and buying extra oatmeal cookies for our drive home. I knew he could sense that this visit had thrown me more than I wanted it to—his hand rested over mine the entire meal. Warm physical contact does wonders for comfort.

Parents at the table next to us were having trouble controlling their toddler son: he was a bit possessive over his mother’s phone, on which he was playing a game or watching a video or something else with obnoxious sound effects. Will and I looked at each other knowingly, and on our walk down the street we discussed. I loved talking about children with him—it was a recent development that let me know he was on the same page in regards to our future. In the last few months, we had tentatively transitioned from saying “when I raise my kids” to “when we raise ours.” The idea that a family could be made from this, from someone I chose to love and that loved me, became overwhelming. I had always been taught that family was an obligatory acceptance, one that I would have to excuse flaws for. Family was not an easy love. Yet here in front of me was this lovely being who loved me back, who I could decide to build a life with. And I loved him for his flaws, not despite them. The easiest love I had and have ever known.

We walked down the beach, arm in arm. I had forgotten to account for summer gloom, so Will donated his sweater and I disappeared inside it. We settled in a little nook to watch the waves crash, on the beach that had occupied my childhood. Musing about our future and watching children play in the waves, I fell asleep in his lap and dreamed of days, months, years ahead.

---

csk

10/2019

to all my beautiful readers: sorry I haven’t posted in so long, and I know this one was a lot to get through! I’ve been doing a little more narrative and a little less poetry lately, but I’m especially proud of this one so I thought I’d post it. more poetry to come next semester, I hope!