236
BOB HAUGEN
"Lloydie dump inna garbage."
"All right, Lloydie. You dump inna garbage."
I watch the door for dressed Grandma to flatfoot jump jump
out. She's still whining something behind it.
Lloydie brings more towels and looks up at me, holding them
out. I drop them on the table.
Grandma jump jumps out dressed after a while. There
is
a
crack in the window.
We eat the smell of Grandma in a tuna casserole.
Grandma weighed ninety-five pounds in the skinny girl phou;
graph Mother keeps loose in an album. She weighs one hundred
eight pounds now. Her arms and legs are skinnier now. What
flesh
was on them has soaked into her middle.
I could circle my hand all around Grandma's four stalks at
the places where they hang onto her frame. The sack of her
body,
slung from wispy shoulder bones, bellies out swollen and then squashes
flat at the bottom where her ass juts an eave over two spider legs.
I am helping her to her chair now, and her ass jiggles every time
her cane thumps on the rug.
Mother, fixing a potion to curl Grandma's hair, breathes through
her mouth.
In the four months she's died here Grandma's smell has grown
into every part of our house. Piss has rotted all our air: my
air,
Mother's air, Lloydie, Jane and Kathy playing outside, we hear them,
their air. Father, the red block, ignores his nose some way we haven't
learned. Father waits for Grandma snorting, scratching himself,
settling himself by a cigarette propped on a tray and coiling the
lean blue that spills up from it around his finger.
Father says
this,
softly : "She's not going to like it."
Mother keeps her fingers moving. "Yes she is."
"Nope. Nope. Nope."
"Yes, she will. She'll be happier once she's got her hair fixed."
"Her scalp is too tender." Father plays with the smoke.
"She has always had pretty hair. She'll want it to look pretty."
Grandma buckles into her cushion. Mother turns and bends
over her. "I bought you a home permanent this morning, Grandma."
"She's not going to like it."
"You shut up, you tease."
Grandma gaps her mouth and stares at Mother.
