The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [17]
I placed the sponge back in the aqua-green sick bowl and rose from the floor. I drained the old water out and refilled it with fresh hot water, squirting in more soap. Then I took the kitchen scissors down from the magnetized knife rack above the sink and knelt again to my work.
The green night-light above the stove and the light of the moon coming through the window were my only companions. With the scissors, I sliced my mother’s skirt from hem to waist. I laid it open on either side of her. I began, ever so gently, to bathe her hips and belly, her thighs and the virtually hairless cleft. I dipped the cloth and sponge repeatedly into the scalding soapy water and stopped over and over again to change it, wishing for the bathtub in the work shed, for a place we could lie together, as if I were a child again and she was stepping in behind me in the tub.
Finally, when I had removed all evidence of her accident and retrieved a fresh sponge from where they were kept above the fridge, I unbuttoned my mother’s loose cotton shirt. I sliced away the straps of her old putty-colored bra. I squeezed out clean water from the sponge onto her breastbone.
Without the bra supporting it, my mother’s remaining breast had fallen so far to the side that her nipple almost grazed the floor. Her mastectomy scar, once a dark slash, was now barely a wrinkled whisper of flesh. “I know you suffered,” I said, and after kissing the fingertips of my hand, I traced them along her scar.
I must have been a teenager. It was still years before my father’s death. Years before she called me over to feel the hard mass just beneath her armpit. I was standing in the doorway, watching them.
“You know how hard it is for me,” my mother said to my father, tears streaming down her face. “Only you know.”
She had unbuttoned her shirt and held it open to him. “Clair!” he gasped. She had rubbed a bloody wound in the center of her chest. I always thought of it as an adult’s version of chicken, which was a game we played at school. Another kid would rub his nail across the inside of your wrist two hundred times. If you couldn’t bear it after the benign rubbing turned into a ribbon of blood, you yelled, “Chicken!” and were known by the name.
“Get your mother a warm towel,” my father said to me, and I bowed my head down. Getting the key to the linen closet from its secret place, I retrieved a fresh towel and ran the water in the bathroom until it grew warm.
The scar from what Jake had called her “martyr’s stigmata,” I would neither bathe nor touch.
I lifted her arms and cleaned the hairless armpits. I swept the sponge over the cap of her shoulders as I lowered her arms back down. I took my free hand and placed it under the drifting solitary bosom. What once was part of the glory she carried was now a lonely sack with the weight of feathers packed in the droopy corner of an old pillow. A surge of lust shot through me as I held it, as pure as an infant’s appetite.
The rose trellis that climbed up the back of our house was lush with vines and flowers by the time I was six or seven. The trellis surrounded both of the small windows in my bedroom, and so at the height of spring, my mother had to keep the flowers and shoots artfully trimmed. It was an operation I loved watching and so, I grew to realize, had my father. The two of them came into my bedroom. She was holding a basket with the handle looped over her arm. Her clippers and work gloves were tucked inside.
“Time for a little high-wire gardening,” my father said, and the two of them approached the first window, which was over an empty twin bed next to mine. I lay on the soft maw of my mattress and watched my father watching my mother as the window took the top half of her