A Cure for Scarring

FRANCES PETTEY DAVIS

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.

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