A Cure for Scarring - Memoir (and)

Margaret is sitting in her new wheelchair when I arrive at her house on the almond ranch. She gives me her winning smile, pale eyebrows lifting in pleasure as I bend to kiss her cheek and touch her thistle-fluff hair. The rooms smell of wood smoke, dried apricots and cloves, no trace of invalidism, tell-tale ammonia. Walls and bookcases are full of her collections—Delft plates and teacups, crystal, Indian baskets and Tahitian carvings. Margaret is eighty and recovering from hip surgery. She’s a fighter, descendent of Danish peasants, a Central Valley farm girl. We expect her to be back on her feet in no time.

Lynn, the new caregiver, comes in from the kitchen nibbling a saltine. Margaret’s daughter Josie refers to her mother’s new helper as “that Okie gal.” Lynn brushes her fingers on her jeans before taking my hand. She is slat-thin, wearing a tee shirt that bellies a little in front due to bloat, or maybe lots of surgical scars. I never see those, only hear about them.

In the afternoon, Lynn and I sit out on the lawn in white plastic chairs while she smokes. Beyond the grape stake fence, the almond orchards are throwing out a mist of spring leaves. Lynn tilts her head to blow smoke straight up, and her long brown hair cascades over her shoulders, split ends curling at the tips like froth. After her cigarette, Lynn sprays the air with Mountain Berry Deodorizer. A cloying sweetness follows her around, enveloping the people she hugs. She believes in demonstrating affection. Lynn tells me the doctor gave her permission to smoke. Cigarettes won’t kill her, she says in her low voice, a voice pulled out of the shallows, where the pain is. Her stomach will kill her. Or what’s left of it. The fifteen feet of intestine remaining after twenty-nine operations. Twenty-nine is a number she repeats often, as if testing its truth. Each surgery left behind so much scar tissue that another part of her gut closed off, requiring yet another operation. Now she watches what she eats. Anything can give her gas or diarrhea—meat, fried food, salad.

Lynn is only thirty-eight but looks older. She looks like a woman who never sleeps, her eyes half-closed, lids drawn in a line across blue irises. What I see in her heavy-lidded eyes and famished face is poverty. She reminds me of the poor kids I grew up with in the Valley, the hand-me-down-clothes girls with broken shoes and no lunches. She reminds me of my Arkie school teacher dad. He worked summers in the peach orchards and welcomed the pickers into his home, but never went to theirs.

From her chair in the back yard, Lynn watches me barbecue chicken while Josie naps inside with Margaret. Smiling, she fingers a gap in her teeth. “This tooth here that’s missing?” she says, talking slow. “I lost it the time they didn’t give me enough anesthetic. I felt the knife and raised up so fast I knocked the tooth out on the oxygen mask. They got a whole lot more careful after that.”

She tells me her folks came out to California from Missouri during “that bad time back then.” The Valley is still full of Okies, the descendents of Dust Bowl farmers and sharecroppers who knew their vegetables, who harvested food for a generation of ingrate Californians, then stayed on and blended in. They’re shopping at WalMart shoulder-to-shoulder with the new immigrants, Cambodians, Hmong, Latinos, and East Indians. They call themselves Okies with a mixture of pride and don’t-mess-with-me scrappiness. They’re my touchstone, a solidity I drift back to from my life on the foggy coast where blood runs cooler and the sun’s too thin.

Lynn points with her cigarette. “What’s that bird up there?”

A guinea fowl is giving its puh-track call in the cedar tree. It’s the last bird from a flock that Margaret kept, I tell her.

She stares up at the lone guinea hen for a while. “My folks ate most anything that moved,” she says finally.

I remember the Joneses, our neighbors, who ate most anything. The wall-papered interior of their house was blurred pink, a valentine box turned inside out. I was five and enchanted with the papered-over doors with missing knobs, hand stains the only proof of a way out. Robins, Mrs. Jones told me, were delicious. I begged until finally they served me one, a toasted little bird on a saucer, like a toy turkey. Its taste was a betrayal—like something dug up rather than plucked from the air. Mr. Jones ate it for me, grinning at my loss, crunching the pretzel bones in his teeth.

The next day Margaret isn’t doing as well as expected. Her fingers point straight out, refusing to bend when she reaches for a cup. Lynn holds it for her, puts food in her mouth and wipes her chin. She does the right things, knows how to lift, with Margaret’s arms around her neck. “That’s my girl,” she says when Margaret stands. But I begin to harbor a secret worry that Lynn’s despair is hovering over Margaret like a cloud of bad air.

Lynn is already the grandmother of twins that she babbles to on the telephone, although they’re only six months old. They’re the children of Lynn’s only daughter Tina, who was born with a cleft palate. Milk leaked from her nose when she nursed. When Lynn’s ex-husband threw Tina against the wall, Lynn hit him on the head with an iron skillet and called 911 before leaving for the hospital with the baby.

She tells me that throwing infants against the wall seems to run in her family. Her sister did it, too, before the state took her kids away. That sister was a heroin addict who got hit by a train, but survived to abuse her kids. Most of the kids in her family have been abused, Lynn says, and some of the abusers are in prison, including the brother who put three bullets in his sister’s boyfriend’s stomach. I don’t know which sister. I don’t ask if the boyfriend died. I’m lost in the details, lost after the polio-twisted brother drugged Lynn’s mother with Soma and got her to sign her house over to him. Lost after whichever of Lynn’s operations put her on disability.

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