Don't Go Crazy Without Me by Deborah A. Lott

Author:Deborah A. Lott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Published: 2020-05-16T16:00:00+00:00

FOUR FATHOMS FIVE

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Screw Nature

Rebecca was treating herself with Vaseline, her all-purpose miracle ointment. It softened skin, shielded wounds from water, greased the works. She stuck it up her nose with a Q-tip to get the dried “boogies” out—and recommended I do the same—she rubbed it into her withered hands each night and slept with them encased in white, cotton gloves. Vazeline, she called it, as if it had a z in it instead of an s. But in the months since the pigeon drop, she had been putting it somewhere else.

Vaseline was not an unfamiliar substance to me either, of course. Every night, my mother reached her fingertip into the large glass jar that sat on our bathroom counter so she could dab a clot of it on the rectal tip of my enema tube before inserting that tip into me.

My grandmother told herself that she just had an irritation; it wasn’t as if she could look. And if she couldn’t see that place herself, she certainly didn’t want anyone else looking. It was that locus of torture, where scheisse, that toxic, dirtiest of all the world’s impure substances, struggled to get out. Now the blood was one more shameful effluent confirming the body’s corruption. So she put globs of Vaseline in her rectum every time she saw red in the toilet, every time she felt a stab of pain. Bigger and bigger globs of it to try to stanch the bleeding.

When my father told me the story afterward, his mouth pressed a little too close to my ear, the details accounted a little too viscerally, I felt as if I were trapped there in Rebecca’s bathroom with the both of them, my grandmother’s remedy going not into her, but injected straight from my father’s voice into me.

This time, the Vaseline failed to perform its miracles. When Rebecca finally allowed the doctor to put his clean, shiny scope up her, her rectum was blooming with cancer. “She’ll need to see a surgeon,” he told my father, who had been pacing the waiting room, sighing and pulling at his thick black curls, “but it may be too late.”

My first cousin Joey and I sat on the covered lawn swing on the grounds of Temple Hospital, where we had been consigned for “some fresh air.” Joey was six months older than me; at the end of the summer he would turn thirteen. Inside, the surgeons worked on my grandmother. Though I only got to see Joey on the weekends, we talked on the phone for hours nearly every night, whispering, giggling, sharing secrets.

If my father had had his way, I would not have been on the swing, I would have been at his side, taking it all in—the anguish in the atmosphere, the surgeon’s pronouncement that my grandmother’s condition was hopeless, the refusal to accept, the sobbing that ensued. For once my mother and Aunt Sonia had prevailed, and I was outside on the lawn with Joey, being buffered like a child.

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