8 October 2005 | Vol. 5, No. 3

Evanston

by LEIGH STEIN

My dad would like to ship my grandmother to Oregon, but first

he calls to ask what I think about heart surgery. She'll die

if they do and she'll die if they don't and there are buckets of hyacinths

on my rooftop, and bathtubs of irises; I don't want to talk about this,

I would rather send flowers.

My grandmother gardened when she could stand, hostas crowded the paths

around the house, squirrels lived in the eaves and there were old heeled shoes

trapped beneath the floorboards of the attic. I was small in that house,

I hid from her in an orange steamer trunk, but when someone is dying

you are supposed to forgive them.

The last time I went home she asked who I was and I left her for the lake.

It was night, the horizon was a hole, I threw off my shoes to feel the weight

of the deep cooling sand and buried my feet under shells. The water was

cold then, it was early spring, before the alewives washed upon the beach

and the gulls ate the eyes.

She taught me to breaststroke and to make brandy desserts without a

recipe; one summer she drank so much she didn't see her dress catch fire

from her cigarette ash and my aunts beat the flames with beaded napkins.

That house was drafty in the heat. I sat at the edge of her furniture, I didn't

crush the pillows; I caught fireflies.

My dad asks if I'm still here and I say yes, I tell him the sky is pink. I don't say

anything about arteries and ventricles, petals and ovaries. I walked deep into

the water until each of my legs was numb to the thigh and I dipped my hands

to drink, swallowed what I remembered. That's where we'll go to scatter her ashes,

with the fish skeletons and the sand.