The Ultimate in Self-Indulgence

So, I'm going to post a short story I wrote several years ago. I'm doing this with some trepidation, but it is a blog, which is kind of self-indulgent anyway...and besides, I like the idea of clicking on the "Publish" button and, in a matter of seconds, becoming a "published" author. Ha. Anyway, here's the story. It's called "Noonie."

For some reason or another, the gardenias aren’t blooming this year. Noonie once got angry with me because, when I was a child, I plucked every one of the sweet white flowers from the arms of the bush outside of her window. I wanted to make perfume. After she scolded me, Noonie felt so bad that she let me help her make a cake. My version of helping at that age naturally consisted of sticking my greedy little fingers into the cake batter and licking the bowl clean once the batter was poured. Maybe Noonie will think I have picked the gardenia bush bare once again, and the same cycle of scolding and making up will occur. I just wish the damn things would have bloomed so that she could at least have something beautiful to look at while she dies.

Everyone in my family calls her Noonie. My mother tells me it is because I couldn’t say “Nana” as a toddler, so I called the person attached to that gently crinkled old face “Noonie.” Personally, I don’t think “Noonie” sounds anything like “Nana,” so I must have been a pretty dumb kid. Noonie likes the name, though, since it makes her think of me. That’s what she says, anyway, because that is the kind of person she is.

We have to bring her home today, my mother and I. They can’t do anything else for her at the hospital, so the doctors told us, in their sterile whispers, to “make her comfortable.” I am not sure how anyone whose body is being eaten by cancer can be made comfortable, but everyone seems to think that bringing her home will do just that. The adjustable bed at the hospital and all the morphine her frail little body can handle sure isn’t doing it for her, so maybe her bed at home has some kind of comfortable magic. I have my doubts.

My mother and I cleaned the house as if we were going to have a dinner party for the president and his cabinet. Noonie will laugh at us for that. Her face will scrunch up as her eyes disappear in the sea of wrinkles that have for so long lapped the shore of her face. The laugh will emerge, as if from nowhere, and become the sort of raspy, gasping music that comes from the belly of an ancient accordion. That music has faded now, into a weak whisper, a mere shadow of the laugh that sang through the days of my childhood. But she will tease my mother, croaking “What did you gussy the place up for?” The laugh will wheeze out again, signaling her gladness that she can still make a joke in this state. My mother will smile, too, a tight, worried smile that I see more and more as the days wear on, and Noonie will sigh a long, weary sigh and probably ask us to put her in bed because all of this excitement has made her tired. We'll sit with her, and I'll try to pretend that part of me isn't dying, too, watching my grandmother melt into the air, fade from existence, as quietly as the advent of the azure twilight that we always loved to experience together from the vantage point of her front porch.

She doesn’t talk much anymore, really, because it requires such effort. I never minded sitting with her in silence until I knew that the silence couldn't be broken without exhausting her to the point of pain. I wish she could tell me her stories again, just once more. That can’t happen, though, so I’ll sit by her bed and hold her hand and tell them to her. I’ll hold her hand and trace the bumpy veins that lie beneath the paper-thin skin, those veins that are now somehow carrying both life and death through her body, following their paths like they are twisting roads to somewhere I have never traveled. Noonie will smile at me because I will have reminded her of the days when I was a child, asking her to show me the map on her arms and to tell me where the roads went. Maybe I don’t want to know where the roads lead to anymore, not if they lead to the place where Noonie is now.

Right now, I’m trying to figure out what to do with these hospital supplies. I’m sorry, but there is no way to arrange a bedpan and puke buckets to look homey. I’ve never known the hospital name for the banana-shaped bowls that patients puke in, so I just call them puke buckets. Noonie has to have lots of them. They are awfully small, and the gallons of green and yellow vomit that come out of my grandmother just don’t fit in those tiny containers. There is the tall stainless steel skeleton, cold, harsh, and endlessly awkward, to negotiate as well. Without the IV bag on it, it looks like some sort of terrible modern art deco piece of crap. With the IV bag on it, it just looks scary, especially when that bag is connected to Noonie via tubes and needles. I decide to put the puke buckets and bedpan sort of under her bed, hidden, and the steel skeleton behind the thick yellow curtain that covers the window beside her bed. We had to get these crazy thick curtains because Noonie can’t stand a whole lot of light anymore. We used to love playing outside, bathing in the sunshine, digging in her garden, catching butterflies and letting them go. Light hurts her now.

I’m running out of things to do around the house, so I begin to re-wash the dishes in the drying rack beside the sink. Staying busy is my only refuge, because I certainly don’t want to deal with what is happening. At least, that is what my mother says. Something about avoidance, the natural cycle of grief, denial. She has been seeing a grief counselor, so she uses all of that woman’s psychoanalytical techniques on me. Maybe my mom is looking for something to do as much as I am.

Leaving the dishes dripping by the sink, I walk into Noonie’s room and turn on the television to fill the silence and I wonder why we put a television in there in the first place. She won’t watch it. Some old-timey pirate movie is on. The man in the black mask is telling the guy he is pointing his sword at to prepare to die. I’ve always thought that was kind of a stupid thing to say. What is that guy supposed to do, make some phone calls and write a last will? Is he going to straighten his room and put on clean underwear? No, preparing to die is what Noonie is doing, what my mother and I are doing for her. We are putting the clean sheets on her bed and making sure she will be “comfortable.” We are putting vases of flowers from her garden around the house. We are trying to ignore death by busying ourselves with the preparations for it. Now I try to ignore it by turning off the television.

The memories of the past and anticipations of things to come hang heavily in the quiet stillness of the house, and those invisible arms of thought seem to physically push me outside. I sit on the front porch and watch a path of ants scurry back and forth from a dead insect to the antihill. They’re really working on that insect, and it occurs to me how strange it all is; even while poor Mr. Insect’s family mourns his death, the ant family rejoices at the thought of the feast they will enjoy tonight. I drag my finger across the ant line absentmindedly, and they scatter, confused. One ant clings to my hand and I let it bite me before flicking it into the yard, savoring the dark pinch that makes my fingers shudder. Another ant has crawled up my leg and is now investigating that jagged scar that bisects my kneecap. The first time I fell off of my bike, I busted my knee on a rock and had to get twelve stitches. Noonie wrapped my bleeding leg in a towel and drove me to the hospital, the whole time telling me how every scar she had told a different story while I imagined a mouthed purpley-red scar blabbing about the first time she had fallen down ice skating. The ant is now feasting on my scar, but that tissue is all numb so I can’t really feel it. I squash him anyway, goddess of destruction that I am, and get up from the porch steps.

The gardenia bush looks sad as I approach it. Maybe somehow it knows Noonie is dying and that is why it won’t bloom. I touch the thick leaves and break one with my fingernail, letting the fragrant green ooze spill out. From somewhere, the scent of the sweet flowers that I once wanted for perfume tickles my nose and I begin to investigate. There! At the bottom of the bush, tucked away out of the sunlight, a single white blossom peeks through the forest of green. I quickly pick the delicate flower and cup it in my hands, rushing inside to put it in a vase so that I can place it by her bed, all the while thinking of the time that Noonie told me that the wings of angles were made of gardenia petals and the flowers’ star-shaped centers were the jewelry they wore. That was only for the girl angels, though.