True Crimes by Kathryn Harrison

Author:Kathryn Harrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-04-04T16:00:00+00:00

Baby New Year

“I’m lost,” my grandmother tells me. She’s calling me at work, where, in New York, it’s about four in the afternoon. She’s in Los Angeles, three hours behind and three thousand miles away.

“What do you mean, ‘lost’?”

“I mean I haven’t the faintest idea where I am!” Behind her indignant voice I can hear traffic, freeway traffic, a sound familiar to anyone who’s ever lived in L.A.—a noise of rushing air, of atmosphere displaced by velocity. It’s a sound so familiar that I never noticed it until long after I’d moved away and returned as a visitor.

“Where were you going?” I ask my grandmother.

“To the dentist.”

“In Pasadena?”

“Yes. Yes. You know, Dr. Bendel.”

“So you’re calling from a pay phone?”

“What do you think!”

“You don’t have to snap at me. You were going northbound on 101?”

“Yes.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I missed the turn or—I don’t know! All of a sudden I didn’t recognize any of the exits.” There is panic in her voice. Just the previous weekend I had yet another argument with my soon-to-be husband, who demanded why I still hadn’t written—why I refused to write—to the Department of Motor Vehicles to ask that my grandmother’s driver’s license be revoked. Was it because I didn’t care if she ran over someone?

“It isn’t only herself she’s jeopardizing,” he said.

“You just don’t get it. You don’t know L.A. There’s no public transportation, not like here in New York, not within walking distance. And she’s alone. Without a car she can’t even get to the market.”

“She can take cabs.”

I didn’t answer. Of course she shouldn’t be driving, not at ninety, balanced on a thick cushion on top of a phone book to achieve enough altitude to see over the steering wheel of her outsize Lincoln. She’s nervous and “a bit hard-of-hearing” and she sees other drivers through the smeary haze of eyeglasses whose lenses she never remembers to clean, lenses she literally butters at breakfast, putting down her toast to push her glasses up from where they’ve slid down her nose. She’s so deaf that even with her hearing aids turned up she can’t understand me if I don’t raise my voice. Certain of my co-workers have become an enthusiastic audience for her calls, which I receive regularly. She has four aged cats, two with pancreatitis, the symptoms of which she reports in gruesome detail, along with her valiant and creative failures to disguise their little enzyme pills in lumps of liverwurst or folded squares of lox. A third has an inoperable brain tumor and is taken with “fits.” The Mexican cleaning lady kindly brings her homemade tamales, which give her indigestion, which in turn inspires her calling me to suggest the indigestion is actually cardiac arrest. Her legs tingle, presaging cerebral hemorrhage. She has a “poisoned” toe. What does it mean, do I think, if she sees falling “twinkles” in her left eye? There are prowlers in the back, and vandals in the front. All these reports interrupt and disturb me, sometimes to the point of tears.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.