Cleaving

For my grandmother

He wanted out of the New England cold. He dreamed of the incandescent possibilities of sunshine, and when she didn’t want to leave her home, he divorced her. So modern, so cutting-edge for the sixties. The children were of age. She could keep working in the silk mill, she could keep the log cabin at the edge of the woods. And he went to Florida where the women had hair that didn’t move, fingers and toes vermilioned. In photos he’s all pastel polo shirts taut over a tan belly, smiles all teeth.

The open spaces of an unmarried mind she filled with work, and church, and driving fast in her little round car, honking the horn if she passed a cyclist with a nice behind. When she retired from the mill she got a job in a supermarket, feeding strangers from tiny sample cups. Here, take one more, giving the extra from a days’ work to her grandchildren.

Solitude tasted like Manhattans and cigars. 

She sliced vegetables to cook in pot roasts. Always with a short and slender knife, never chopping, letting the blade slip through to rest on the pad of her thumb. That cleaving, that almost-pain. She added thyme from her garden, sprigs that women of olden days would sew onto handkerchiefs given to loved ones departing for battle, the scent for remembrance. After dinner she’d throw the meal’s leftovers out back for the animals to come and eat. She could watch from her bedroom window.

The foxes she liked best. Some nights they returned to her yard instead of hunting, having learned to eat what scraps were left. Though the meat tore easily, the bread sat heavy in the stomach.

Then, after three decades, he returned, to stay. The metal wheelchair chilled his bones, all jutting angles. Now he lived with a stranger in a strange room full of labeled belongings and plasticine upholstery. Tangles of protein in his brain, he could greet his son-in-law without trouble but his daughter’s name was forever just out of reach. He knew his ex-wife and asked about her when she wasn’t there. How was she? When would she come?

She brought him boxing matches taped on VHS to pass the time in his little room, a sport he’d once enjoyed, but there could be no more keeping of meticulous score. There must have been some reason why these men circled the ring, gloves up, stuck spiraling in a past that was now recorded and saved.

Without teeth and with his tongue heavy in his mouth, all of his food was liquid. She mixed him sports drinks thickened with powder, like sweet mucus. She held the straw to his lips, she wiped his chin. Sometimes she’d bring a vanilla milkshake and they would sit together in the manicured courtyard. His knobbed hand reached out to hold hers.

Each time he tried to tell her, in words, in gestures, what he meant to say. But how true is an apology without recollection of what’s apologized for? 

Each time he tried. After a while, she’d let go of his hand and murmur OK, meaning enough, meaning I’m tired. 

At home in bed, she’d run her fingers over the matelassé blanket’s nubs and gaps. The foxes would be back again tomorrow, not knowing any better. She would feed them; she couldn’t forget.