To wake her up and reintroduce myself might be a cruel blow, designed to strip away
any remaining vestiges of memory she may have of a time when she had been, well, not young
exactly, but not old, either, and certainly not wasting away in a pink room in a dismal hospital
in a nameless suburb.
I don’t know why I remain here, why I take a seat next to her bed and wa tch her, stay
with her, bear witness to a life slowly wasting away.
Maybe because I’m the only one who’s here.
*
*
*
I lay on her bed, naked except my boxer shorts. I was nineteen. For reasons I don’t
remember, or never knew, that was the ritual: that I would remove my clothes only to my
boxers and she would take care of the rest for me. She would run her hands and then her lips
over my body. I was angular and hard and rangy, my ribs threatening my skin, wrists the
diameter of young bamboo. She was thin, too, and perpetually tanned, her skin starting to show
the wear of four decades. She, Mrs. Flanagan, was forty-six.
She had furrowed wrinkles around her eyes and a few deep bruises, almost like stains,
on her shins and one on her lower thigh, but from mid- thigh up, at certain angles you’d be hard
pressed to think she wasn’t my age. But nothing about her or her nudity or her offering herself
up to me so easily was ever very shocking. It seemed to just happen and it all seemed natural, a
rite of passage for a n otherwise bored kid who’d decided to stay in his off -campus apartment
for summer break. It all seemed, somehow, normal. More shocking than anything else was
seeing Mrs. Flanagan’s eyes as we lay in bed. Seeing her face without her glasses; that made
her appear to me far more naked than her actual nakedness did.
10
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