The Liars' Club: A Memoir (9 page)

Lecia was both better-tempered and better at kissing ass than I was, so she fared better. But the pressure must have gotten to her too. It was during Grandma’s residency that my sister stuffed me struggling into the clothes hamper that pulled out from the bathroom wall, and left me screaming among the mildewed towels till Mae Brown came back from getting groceries. Also, she took to plastering down her bangs with so much hair spray that neither wind nor rain could move them. (I called her Helmet-head.) And she lengthened all her skirts so her knees didn’t show anymore. In pictures from then, she looks like a child trying to impersonate an adult and coming out some strange gargoyle neither adult nor child. Once she even had me climb up on her shoulders, then draped a brown corduroy painter’s smock to hang from my shoulders to her knees. We staggered from house to house pretending we were some lady collecting for the American Cancer Society. I remember holding a coffee can out to various
strangers as I listed side to side on her shoulders. We didn’t clear a dime.

In fairness to Grandma, she was dying of cancer at fifty, which can’t do much for your disposition. Still, I remember not one tender feeling for or from her. Her cheek was withered like a bad apple and smelled of hyacinth. I had to be physically forced to kiss this cheek, even though I was prone to throwing my arms around the neck of any vaguely friendly grown-up—vacuumcleaner salesman, mechanic, checkout lady.

The worst part wasn’t all the change she brought, but the silence that came with it. Nobody said anything about how we’d lived before. It felt as if the changes themselves had just swept over us like some great wave, flattening whatever we’d once been. I somehow knew that suggesting a dinner in the middle of the bed, or stripping down when I came in from playing, would have thrown such a pall of shame over the household that I couldn’t even consider it. Clearly, we had, all this time, been doing everything all wrong.

I had this succinct way of explaining the progression of my grandmother’s cancer to neighbor ladies who asked: “First, they took off her toenail, then her toe, then her foot. Then they shot mustard gas through her leg till it was burnt black, and she screamed for six weeks nonstop. Then they took off her leg, and it was like a black stump laid up on a pillow. When we came to see her, she called Lecia by the wrong name. Then she came home, and it went to her brain, so she went crazy, and ants were crawling all over her arm. Then she died.”

At the end of this report, Lecia and I would start scanning around whoever’s kitchen it was for cookies or Kool-Aid. We knew with certain instinct that reporting on a dead grandma deserved some payoff. After a while, Lecia even learned to muster some tears, which could jack-up the ante as high as a Popsicle. (If I gave my big sister a paragraph here, she would correct my memory. To this day, she claims that she genuinely mourned for the old lady, who was a kindly soul, and that I was too little and mean-spirited then to remember things right. I contend that her happy memories are shaped more by convenience than reality: she also recalls tatting as fun, and Ronald Reagan, for whom she voted twice, as a good guy.) I couldn’t have cried for Grandma under
torture. But I knew my spiel and could nod earnestly to back up Lecia’s snot-nosed snubbing. As in most public dealings with grown-ups, I blindly counted on people’s pity to get me what I wanted.

For a long time Grandma’s entire slow death from cancer stayed fenced inside that pat report. It’s a clear case of language standing in for reality. Perhaps the neighbor ladies who heard me tell it back then were justly horrified by my lack of grief instead of being wowed—as I intended them to be—by how well I was bearing up. To them, I nod mea culpa for this lie. Believe me, I fooled no one worse than I fooled myself by blotting out the whole eighteen-month horror show.

Lecia kowtowed to the old lady because it kept the peace and bought her points with Mother. I just tried to slip around her, the reasons for which avoidance are vague. Whether she liked to wash me or to pull at my hair snarls with a fine-toothed comb, I could not for many decades figure. The central feeling that arises from memory of that time is a fear that starts low in my spine and creeps upward till it borders on low-level panic. Even now, part of me flinches at any mention of her. I would just as soon keep that wheelchair she occupied in my head empty of its ghost.

Maybe this aversion comes partly from a kid’s normal intolerance for the infirm. Somebody dying sucks quite a bit of attention-voltage from grown-ups in a family, but believe me, for a kid it’s like watching paint dry. Truly, I could not gin up much enthusiasm for it. Maybe some kids can; maybe there are Christian children reared with deep saintly streaks who read Scripture to their rotting grandparents in the early dusk. I did not. She lasted too long and made my mother cry too much.

Besides, we hadn’t known her that well before she got sick. I had inherited her name, Mary. Except for our one trip to Lubbock, she had been little more than that name carefully executed in Venus pencil on a series of construction-paper cards. One of these was red and heart-shaped, pasted onto a lacy paper doily. It got saved in Daddy’s gold cigar box, for some reason. The envelope has M. D. Anderson Hospital (which is now the Houston Medical
Center) for an address. The heart opens up to this odd message: “Dear Grandma, I hope you are getting better. There was a man in a car wreck who died three feet tall. Here is the man.” Then there’s a horizontal stick figure with X’s for eyes next to a bubble-shaped car with what looks like a Band-Aid on it. I guess that was my studied approximation of death, at the time.

Still, no matter how bland a gaze you try to put on remembering an ugly illness, to protect yourself from the sheer tedium of it, if you spend any time at all speaking about it to some nodding psychiatrist, you will eventually stumble into a deep silence. And from that silence in your skull there will develop—almost chemically, like film paper doused in that magic solution—a snapshot of cold horror. So just when I’d started to believe that the terse chronology of Grandma’s cancer that I’d prattled off all my life held all the truth, some windowshade in the experience flew up to show me what suffering really is. It’s not the old man with arthritic fingers you glimpsed trying to open one of those little black, click-open purses for soda change at the Coke machine. It isn’t even the toddler you once passed in a yard behind a chain-link fence, tethered to a clothesline like a dog in midday heat. Those are only rumors of suffering. Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in its most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name.

The doctors piped mustard gas through Grandma’s leg to try to stop the spread of her melanoma, and the result was suffering of the caliber I mention. Today it’s hard to imagine a treatment more medieval. When I grew up and read about the Great War, how clouds of mustard gas floated over trenches and seared the lungs of soldiers, I couldn’t begin to fathom the doctors’ reasoning in applying it to that old woman, whose fair-complected leg was charred by the treatment into something petrified-looking. But of course the leg was flesh and bone, from which the marrow cooked away. She did indeed, according to my mother, scream without break for weeks, not days, this despite morphine. Gangrene set in, and they had to amputate anyway.

The idea of Grandma losing her leg didn’t bother me much at
first because it stayed in the realm of make-believe. Lecia and I fancied her having a wheelchair we could take for rides. We were big on Peter Pan at the time, so I tended to imagine her with a peg leg, like a pirate. Riding in the car to the hospital that first day, I even drew a picture of her with a wooden peg and a plumed hat with skull and crossbones à la Captain Hook. Lecia had the infinite good sense to fold this into quarters and rathole it in her back pocket before Mother got a glimpse of it.

But Mother was running on such psychic overdrive that it might not have even registered. As Nervous as she tended to be, she could always rally in times of crisis. Really, she was something to watch. I have seen her dismantle and reassemble a washing machine, stitch up a dress from a thirty-piece Vogue pattern in a day, ace a college calculus course after she’d gone back to school at forty, and lay brick. We used to say that if she really had her titty in a wringer, she could flat go to work wrestling it out. Grandma’s sickness was such a time. All trace of Nervous just evaporated from my mother. Her chin tilted up to suggest a kind of determined ease. She slimmed down and moved only when absolutely necessary, yet she seemed never to rest. It’s no wonder that she collapsed after the funeral, since she was running on fumes from the git-go.

There must have been rules back then about kids not being on cancer wards. But Mother had the idea that we would cheer Grandma up. Plus Daddy was working days, and she had run out of people to leave us with. I’d never been in a hospital before. And of course what you generally remember from that era is the smell of Pine Sol, that and all the impressive running around, people being wheeled in and out of places with tubes and bottles swaying over them.

The hospital gets vivid at the instant when Lecia pulled my elbow to turn me away from a guy horking up what looked like clean water into a little kidney-shaped silver pan. I turned from the sick man and entered the invisible cloud of odors that floated around Mother at that time: Shalimar and tobacco and peppermint Life Savers. For some reason, I recall it drifting just above
my head, which moved at the level of her hipbone, so I could crane my head up and breathe deeply and draw some of her down into my lungs. She wore a long army-green silk dress and a brown alligator belt from Chanel. She had a long stride and led with her thigh like a fashion model. Her high heels hardly made any noise the way she set her foot down in them. Her head seemed far away from me. Her hair was short and thick and brushed straight back from her face and looked from my height like a lion’s mane.

She pushed open some double doors. You could hear somebody crying
please please please
but in a whispery voice. We passed the room of a surprisingly young woman whose black hair was woven into a big tower. She lay back on a La-Z-Boy recliner, holding a red rubber enema bottle pressed against her jaw, and you could hear organ music from a radio ball game as you walked by. Then we were at Grandma’s room, easing a big silent door open.

The really shocking thing about an amputation is how crude it looks. Really, you would think that they could tidy it up, and maybe by now they have. Anybody who has ever had to dismantle a deer with a hunting knife or even fried up a chicken or a rabbit knows how brutal it feels to hack through bone and cartilage. I guess in the operating room at that time they used a small circular saw, but it all amounts to the same thing. Somehow I had expected Grandma’s lopped-off leg to seem more like a doll’s, bloodless and neat. Maybe I expected a bandage on it.

They had taken the leg off above the knee, and Grandma’s remaining thigh was propped on a hospital pillow. It looked very interrupted. There were still streaks of black running from the stump end up her thigh in what looked like narrowing rivers. Whether these were from the gas burns or the subsequent blood poisoning, I don’t know. You could see how they’d tried to save enough flesh from the thigh to fold it over the cut bone. Somebody had tried to stitch it all down neatly so it might look as if it had grown that way. But you could tell from the stitching that the edges were randomly folded over in the ragged way you might try to close up a pork roast you were stuffing. The stitches were flat black and pinched at her very white skin. Plus they had slathered
some kind of ointment all over the thigh, so the whole thing looked painfully shiny and wet. Even with the five bunches of flowers her sisters had sent, the room reeked of something like a black stinging horse liniment I had smelled on a ranch once. That was the burn medicine, I suppose.

I wanted to leave right away, just looking at that leg. But the door had hissed shut behind us, and Grandma’s face was rolling our way already. (Here time telescopes and gets slow, for some reason. I almost have to hold my head very still to keep from backing away.) She was so thin and pale you could practically see straight through her. Her lips were bluish and her hair had gotten whiter, so that her eyes, when the lids flickered open, seemed paler, as if she’d seen something that scalded her inside. Lecia walked right over to the edge of the bed like it was no big deal. Grandma opened and closed her mouth a few times like a fish, not saying anything. They had taken out her dentures, which sat on a napkin on top of her bed table. There were also those little white strings of spit running between her lips, and she had some yellow crust in the corners. Mother said that somebody really might have washed her up and put her teeth in, but she didn’t seem alarmed really. That put me off, because I could usually count on Mother to be at least as big a sissy as I was, and I was ready to bolt. Grandma’s hand kind of patted the mattress by her, and Lecia grabbed it right off. That made Grandma suck in her breath real suddenly, so Lecia dropped the hand and took a step back. Then Mother stepped in and smoothed her white hair back gently and asked how she felt. Grandma just started patting the bed toward Lecia again. She fixed that empty stare on Lecia as if she had just descended to the bedside from the clouds. She sucked in her breath hard again and said, “Belinda! Where have you been? Thank God, Belinda.” Then her voice got quiet again, and she went on and on about how she’d missed her and looked for her, and Lecia just played along like she was this person we’d never heard of.

But for some reason this Belinda stuff put a cold corkscrew through the center of where I stood. It was even worse than seeing
that stump all Frankensteined-up with black stitches and black streaks running up her crepey white thigh.

Before we left, Mother threw a screaming cuss fit at the two doctors who’d done the mustard gas treatment. It was never fun when Mother raised hell in public, but in this instance, I almost welcomed it. After being shut down all day, zombielike, she seemed to descend back into her body. (Maybe, like the Greeks used to say, her
ate
suddenly filled her.) The doctors just stood with their coffee mugs, as if it didn’t occur to them to walk away. I remember some hospital administrator, an enormous woman in a flowered dress that made her look a lot like a sofa, rushing out from behind her glass window to run interference for them. Mother was screaming that doctors were vultures feeding off people’s pain, and at that point the woman put her hand on Mother’s arm and offered to say a rosary for Grandma, to which Mother said, “Don’t you go Hail-Marying over my mother!”