In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [51]
When I was told, I felt numb and far away, not just out of grief for my grandfather, whom I would miss, but also out of grief for Nan. Why was she given so much to bear? It didn’t seem fair that she should lose her mother, then her first husband and father, and now this other husband who had once embodied the promise of a new life.
Even now, I wonder at my grandmother’s fortitude. Once, a few months after her open-heart surgery and a year before she died at seventy-three of heart failure, I asked her how she had stood it. She told me, “You just go on, Sister. There’s not much choice.” I looked at the still-red scar splitting her chest, her face drawn with the effort to breathe. Yet in her eyes I could see the spark, that will to survive.
Those nights as a child when I lay in my grandmother’s bed, comforted by her soft presence, I felt little nostalgia for the woods, or even Luke. Instead, I thought of the faces of young men I had seen on Nan’s TV: Bobby Sherman, David Cassidy, others with pearly grins and hair brushing their shoulders. Nan gave me money to buy the teen magazines that held their pictures, then gave me half the wall space in her room to hang the glossy centerfolds.
I don’t know what my parents thought of this. I’m sure they were not pleased, but what could they say? Nan still held sway as the family matriarch and harrumphed mightily at the stodgy teachings of our church. She trimmed my hair, painted my nails, asked me to stay up late to watch Dean Martin and the Gold Diggers. I leaned into her shoulder, eyes down, imagining her staring my father cold in the eye, daring him to challenge her. I was thrilled to feel some nick in my father’s omnipotence, but I know now that she was only slightly less intimidated by his sternness than I was, and that he often demurred to her as much out of amusement as authority.
During the course of those long summer days in Lewiston, I became more and more aware of the changes in my body. The hair on my legs and under my arms had set in with earnest. Now could I shave? Absolutely not. My mother passed on the answer from my father, then looked at me sympathetically. She knew that dark hair sprouted above my kneesocks, but she would never consider compromising my father’s authority.
Ronnie, my father’s eldest brother, lived with Nan then. He and Dorothy had divorced, and he played guitar with his own country-western band, traveling around the Northwest, wildly popular with the locals. He was a tall, handsome man, blue eyes and black hair, and his voice held just enough edge to make the women wonder what he had suffered in love. He’d come home late, and I often woke to hear him humming in the bathroom. The next morning, I could still smell the sharpness of his aftershave mixed with the bar smells of stale cigarettes and whiskey. I breathed it in, wondering at the way it moved me, as though what I inhaled were attached to some memory.
I found my uncle’s razor in the medicine cabinet. I picked it up, considered its edge bristly with whiskers, then carefully replaced it next to the can of shaving cream. The next morning, Sunday, I told my parents I didn’t feel well, then watched them pull from the driveway, headed for church. Nan was in the potato patch, a mason jar of gasoline in her hand. Normally I would have run to help her. I liked pulling the striped beetles from the leaves and dropping them into the amber liquid, not because of the killing but because of the good it did: less bugs, more spuds. I was drawn to these kinds of easy efficiencies.
This day I had something else in mind. I went into the bathroom and locked the door, then opened the cabinet. The razor lay as I had left it. I memorized its angle on the shelf, the direction it pointed. I didn’t think Uncle Ronnie, who wouldn’t be out of bed for hours, would notice if I were careful.
I filled the tub with hot water,