When I Was Young and In My Prime (25 page)

The nurse comes in to give Grandpa a sponge bath, my cue to take my leave, head back to the city. He gives her a savvy wink and she smiles, says, “Now you behave yourself Mr. Friesen,” wagging her finger as she pulls the curtain, gamely following the script. I wait a second at the door, listen in. His voice is shaky, but he's singing.
 

Oh when I was young and in my prime
 

I used to do it all the time.
 

Now I'm old and getting grey
 

I only do it once a...

I probably wouldn't let a man make innuendoes with me like that at the bar, but would I at the nursing home?

Whatever the case, right now I love her for allowing him the dignity of humour.

“And who darns your socks?” the nurse asks Grandpa as she's putting them onto him.
 

“I do.” His speech is agonizingly slow, but the nurse is patient. “Me, myself and I. Not the neatest job in the world. But it works by God.”
 

She whistles and says, “You're a rare man Mr. Friesen, darning your own socks.”
 

“That's,” he pauses, taking a long while to swallow, “my mother.”
 

“She taught you?”
 

“Oh yes. Punishment. Best punishment she ever invented.”
 

Good Friday is the day we agree on for clearing out Grandpa's apartment. He's still in the hospital, growing thinner and thinner, oxygen tubes in his nose, IV in his wrist, a string to call the nurses safety-pinned to his gown. He lies there tied, bird-boned and awkward.
 

We spend most of the day in separate rooms—Mom in the kitchen, Uncle Nick in the bedroom, me in the living room—cleaning, boxing, sorting. Every once in a while, one of us wanders to another room for company, then wanders back to our task. At one point, Uncle Nick strides into the living room, showing me an armful of shaving soaps.
 

“I distinctly remember throwing out at least a dozen shaving soaps when we sold the house and taking home a half-dozen more,” he says. “How many shaving soaps does one man need?”

Mom hears us and comes in from the kitchen, bearing a massive spool of string.
 

“Okay,” she says, “who wants this? If you take it, it's a commitment. We had one of these spools in the shed on the farm growing up, remember Nick? I still remember the day—I must have been thirteen or fourteen—when I went out to the shed to get some string for a package Mom was wrapping, and there it was, the last piece. I was stunned. Couldn't believe there was actually an end to it. It had always just been there.”

No one else wants his knives so I take them all, wooden-handled, thin-edged, curved concave with years of sharpening—seven of them, fanning like feathers from cleaver down to paring knife. I also take his whetstone.
 

I've never sharpened knives before. Now there is this inheritance: the peeling away of a layer of his life, the laying on of a layer of mine. I'm sharpening my new knives daily. The sound of steel against stone draws me in. More and more I feel myself part of the cycle, the order of things—unchoosing, almost animal. Cutting is different now. I've always had cheap, dull knives; I've always cut with force. Now the introduction, the thin entrance of the blade. Smooth. Charming. I draw one of his knives through an onion with almost no resistance.
 

There's a superstition about the need to pay for the gift of a knife. Payment absolves the giver of any violence perpetrated with it. We haven't told him yet about the clearing out of his apartment, so Grandpa doesn't know that he's given me his knives.
 

I could drop seven pennies into the pocket of his coat that hangs in the hospital room locker.
 

I could stack seven pennies on the oxygen machine at his bedside.
 

Or, I could place them one after another in his palm and say it's in exchange for seven thoughts.
 

He's awake lately only for a minute at a time—half a sentence at most. Again and again I watch his eyes close, his fists release. If I were to pay for the gift of the knives, he'd drop each penny one by one. When I left there would be pennies scattered among his sheets. When the nurses stripped the bed, a small rain of copper.
 

seven thoughts for seven pennies for seven knives

it's about time that
 

I'll be damned if

can you hear the

when I was a nurse I
 

lilacs are the only
 

I used to love it when
 

listen here—

At Easter dinner, my cousin Max's girlfriend is talking about a quiz she found on the internet which can supposedly detect your gender by how you answer a series of questions. Questions like,
Would you rather have your bedroom painted blue or white? Would you rather work first and have fun later, or vice versa?
One question in particular makes me look up from my ham.
Would you rather be desperately lonely for the rest of your life or slowly bleed to death right now?
I don't catch which answer means you are a woman, but I do catch myself thinking with a deep unforeseen gladness which spreads in a wave from my torso to my fingertips, I'd rather be lonely. No question.
 

Getting up from the table to go pee, I bend to kiss James on the neck as I pass him, and my heart gives a clutch at how heartened and surprised he looks.

Clara and the triplets arrived late. She looks exhausted, says she's taken to not wearing her seatbelt. I realize I don't really believe in other people's suffering much of the time. The triplets keep eyeing me as if I have an absurd haircut. Maybe I do.
 

Every few minutes I remember that Grandpa is in the hospital, probably dying.

Watching Clara with her triplet toddlers—the moment by moment decisions, when to chastise, when to console, what to emphasize and command, what to discourage and ignore, what to laugh off—it strikes me how short a distance good intentions take us. I used to think I could coast on them all the way home, but I'm coming to see they only barely get you started. After that you need assorted things like humour, bloody-mindedness and luck.

Uncle Nick is teaching the kids “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” as payback to Clara for her childhood. Also a song that goes,
 

This is the song that never ends
 

Yes it goes on and on my friend
 

Some people started singing it not knowing what it was
 

And they'll continue singing it forever just because
 

This is the...
 

In all my eighty-eight years,
he says,
this is the fastest I've seen it.
Each word is separate, slow—thick-skinned bubbles launched through a heavier air. When they burst, heard, the room is washed by the hollowness they held. It's the first full sentence he's spoken in English in days.
 

Lately he's taken to speaking in Low German, his mother tongue. The nurses call it delirium, but sometimes, when we're alone, he translates.
Ich kann nicht verstehen.
I lean in close. Five minutes later, eyes closed:
I can't understand
. As I leave, his eyes still closed:
Adieu, Adieu, Adieu.
Three white handkerchiefs hung out one by one on the line.
 

Today I'm talking to him about spring, about the leaves coming out—how improbable the green, how quick, how if you're not careful you miss it. I'm just talking, not expecting a reply. He has a view of the treetops from his hospital window. Then, like an upper branch showing up in full leaf one morning on a tree you took for dead, he says,
In all my eighty-eight years, this is the fastest I've seen it.
 

I asked Mom the other day if it's true that time goes faster as you get older. “Oh Lord yes,” she said. “Faster and faster every year.”

I think of those centrifugal force rides at the midway where you stick to the wall and your cheeks slide out of position and you can't lift your head or even move sometimes. Round and round so that, by the end, the most you can hope to focus on is not swallowing your tongue.
 

Grandpa in his hospital bed, not answering.