“There’s something missing, or different, I think they painted the shutters.” My grandmother sits very still next to me in my father’s SUV, my mother on the other side of me shifts her weight to get a better look at the brick house, sagging slightly on itself, as if its succumbing, kneeling before to the thick mead of grass it rests on. No one speaks. We are there, my parents, grandparents and I at a pause in front of this hovel, a little compartment of a place my mother called home from decades.
“Well, there it is,” my mother reaches for my first three fingers and grasps them on her lap. I tired to imagine her in there with her brother and sister, Dan and Susie, all of them scooting around like little chickadees, bumping into each other, maybe spatting a bit then scurrying off to keep to their own. My grandmother, with her hair pinned up in a simple, auburn twist, a few stray strands clinging a bit to her long neck in the humidity of late July and the heat of the electric coils on the stove as she pressed the spatula into the buttered bread for grilled cheese. The house would be neat as it is now, because there would be no room nor patience for clutter or unnecessary objects, which is why, she never saved much of anything, only single braids of hair from her children’s first haircuts, tied with ribbon, placed in a cardboard jewelry box, settled in the same drawer she kept one box of the most necessary of heirlooms, my grandfathers dog tags and ID bracelet, a few yellowed news clippings and a paper-clipped stack of photos.
*
My grandmother, she whisks batter, for a bunt cake, or chocolate chip cookies, or brownies. She doesn’t believe in electric mixers, says elbow grease is the only way to perfecting batter. Her biceps protrude through her wiry but sturdy frame. She is so strong in her age of 89, still stands there with that bowl wedged between her breast and the crook of her arm. I whisk like she does, standing strong with the bowl, in the same place between my breast and the crook of my arm. I bake in my underwear and a white tank top stolen from a boy awhile back and I imagine my grandmother, young, my age, standing with slacks and a white short-sleeved blouse, her hair pulled away from her face. I imagine her kitchen growing warmer
*
My grandmother would have made breakfast while the sun stretched its rays a crossed the newborn sky, early enough that a solo robin chirped to itself while others were still rousing in the tree tops. She would feel the onset of heat before she climbed out of bed, the heaviness of the air premature for a morning early in June, waking her before the light did.
Her hair would be pinned up in a neat auburn twist, a few whips escaping from their hold with the breeze through the open windows and screen door. A quenching breeze that she knew would dwindle well before noon, replaced by a heat that bloomed like her hydrangeas on the front stoops, poufs of orange and marigold. She retrieves a red cardboard box of long stick matches and lights the burners, matches that will stay in that very spot, 3rd drawer down in her kitchen, where, when she is a grandmother, she will retrieve them to show her granddaughter how to light candles.
She’d fold a paper towel into a prim square and daub Crisco in orbits and halos around her pans, grease them the same way she’d bathe her children when they were infants, quickly, efficiently, leaving no crevice untouched.
Bacon was expensive so she stuck to sunny-side up eggs, fried eggplant and perhaps a nest of fried noodles.
*
I spent my childhood memorizing every part of her hands, the surface of her palms and the lines that undulate and swerve across her joints.
Hers are muted and pearly in the light, holding tranquility in her palms, weathered and worn.
Mine showing the beginnings of calluses from erosion on flesh from helping my father in the kitchen, kneading, scrubbing, dicing, the rub of kitchen tools on thin skin.
Her flesh with its balmy folds and puckers seems as if it has just been laid across her bones like paper mache.
Mine are like blown glass, Christmas ornaments, appear delicate and weak but are derived from heat, withstood oven burns, paper cuts and chapped winter air.
My grandmother’s palms trap scents of basil and mint from cooking supper or pulling weeds from her herb garden.
The tips of my fingers and the spaces between them absorb the scent of perfume from hurried spritzes out of the bottle and coffee when I sop up the foam from the bottom of a daily cappuccino. The dull hint of flowers and espresso beans lingers there all day. Sometimes I rest my hand across my mouth, just below my lower lip so I can inhale it.
Her knuckles are like uncultured pearls extracted from fresh oysters, silken with a dull sheen. The skin that stretches over them fades in hue when she makes a fist or curls her fingers around crochet hooks, iridescent in the wash of dull lamp light.
I like how easily my knuckles crack. Using my thumb as leverage, I push each finger into my palm until the joint readjusts with a satisfying pop. This habit makes some cringe and shiver, cover their ears.
“Your gorgeous hands are going to end up ruined and deformed like mine!” my mother shoves her hands under my nose. Her knuckles bulge from the center of her fingers that bend in odd angles. The ovals of her fingernails are misshapen and uneven. My mother’s hands remind me of pieces of shrapnel or knotted roots on an ancient tree. But I think they are beautiful in a way I think driftwood and beach glass is beautiful. Natural and weathered from earth. Imperfect, just like her mothers.
My grandmother’s hands have rivulets of indigo veins that I would squeeze between my small fingertips. I loved how they felt as I pressed them down, cutting off blood flow until I released them, blood filling them plump.
My blood vessels are only visible when I’m cold or vertical. Azure against olive flesh, thin and flowing like raindrop trails on a car window.
My grandmother would encase my hand in hers, enveloping it in a swaddle. I remember her hands always giving off an internal heat that never dulled.
My hands are made like hers, to rub and massage, kneed tense muscles on his torso, roll ovals into the fleshy part of his back with the heels of my palms, scrunch his shoulders with my fingers. I like how his muscles turn into something malleable like dough from the warmth of my hands, like silly putty or clay, allaying under the power of my exertion.
But I hate how they swell in the heat: how the rings that I feel naked without become just snug enough that I have to soap up my hand to slide them off. Typing, writing and cooking are a struggle when my fingers are engorged from summer humidity, refuse to bend, the skin across my knuckles will split open and ooze like blisters, become clumsy, fumble and falter even the most simple tasks like holding a pencil, brushing my teeth, painting my nails. The tool becomes entangled between the spaces of my fingers, falling to the floor or counter where I pick it up only to fumble again. And if I try to make a fist, or spay my fingers across the steering wheel of my car, my flesh stretches across my bones aches more than the joints themselves, like leather or sheep’s skin desiccated on a frame. I hate the hangnails and cracked edges of cuticles that fray near the bed of my nail so that I bite or tear at them until they bleed and well up with blood, until they are sore for days after and I have to rub Vaseline to alleviate and coax them.
