I loved playing with her pill bottles. I lined them up in an arching stack around me, the tight-bunched loops of her carpet making hooked imprints on my knees. She watched wrestling on TV, or my mother would sit in front of her with a tight scowl plucking hairs from her chin, lip, and unibrow with tweezers. My mom smeared Vaseline over Aunt Oda’s face while she sat on a plastic hospital stool in front of her. The course hairs would stand up in the thick grease. There was always a thin coating of it on her skin, but my mother put more on to pluck her wild hairs. I loved my Great Aunt, but every time I hugged her, I was careful not to touch her face because the Vaseline grossed me out.
The way my family moved her in her wheelchair resembled moving a chiffarobe more than it did a woman. If there was too much of a slope, she would tip out and fall face first onto the cement. Aunt Oda weighed upwards of three hundred pounds. Her body was a wide rectangle with her knees in a permanent sitting position due to crippling arthritis. (“That old Artheritis” my grandmother would say, always adding the word “old” and punctuating with an extra vowel things or people that she didn’t like. For example, her niece who she hated was “Old Kathahleen” instead of Kathleen. )
Aunt Oda had no neck. Her head was round and pale. White course hair in a spray of scruff stood out in an upside down fan shape pulled into a little barrette on top. Her hands were useless to brace her falls because her fingers twisted together, like a precise sailor’s knot of pink supple skin.
I was seven when I took over the job of steering her chair around the house or on one of our outings to eat every Sunday after church. I watched her caregiver Miss Brannon concentrate on taking a turn with grace to not even bump the metal rims standing out from her wheels as she slid her into the hall. She leaned over Aunt Oda’s left ear to let her know what she was going to do next so that it wasn’t a surprise whether she was going to go into the kitchen or the bedroom. Of course, Aunt Oda already spat out exactly which way she wanted to go, but I think Miss Brannon did it just as a courtesy. Just to let her know she was listening.
I always wanted to ride on her lap, but her fat thighs had such a slope to them that there was no room. Her chair was wider than most doors. It had a brown leather seat that started to crack in the middle where tufts of dirty matted cotton would creep its way further and further out of the seat. I could only see this when I would climb beneath her chair to play or when she wasn’t in it.
Her handicapped van was a thrill for me. Having a metal elevator in your van is fodder for endless games and injuries to a kid. My dad let me push her out of her dark house into the carport where he lowered the lift of her brown striped van so that the metal lip would gently skid to a soft flush with the cool gray cement floor. Like a furniture dolly, he would tip Aunt Oda’s chair backwards to pull her onto the ramp. It was my job to lock her brakes down onto the gray hard rubber tires that never needed inflating.
By the time I was ten I would wedge my body between her chair and the floor of the van with my right hand on the ridged hard plastic of her wheelchair handle, and slap my left hand down on the red lever that would initiate the lift with a sputtering cough. She and I levitated while the van made a slow tilt to the right. I would throw my ten-year-old frame backwards extending my arms to heave the weight of her into the middle of the van and lock the arm of her chair into a bronze painted metal pinching claw.
She was my grandmother’s older sister. Grandma always watched over her and made sure she was cared for when Aunt Oda ran her help off. Miss Brannon stayed the longest of any of them, but my sister Pamela (who I always called Sissy) said that it was because Miss Brannon got relieved at nighttime by a night nurse, and Aunt Oda was the meanest at night. Sissy was older than me, so once when Aunt Oda ran off the night help lady, she had to drive over and stay with her. She said she never heard so much cussing and screaming in her life. I never heard Aunt Oda swear, but Sissy said just wait, that if I ever had to stay with her and had to say no to giving her any more pain pills that I would get an education in cussing. Sissy only went that one time. Daddy threatened once to take her car away if she didn’t help when Aunt Oda ran off a lady a month later and Sissy walked up to him and gave him her car keys. Miss Brannon only went home every two weeks, and I wondered out loud how she slept if Aunt Oda yelled as much as everyone said she did, but Grandma just said that she would turn her hearing aid off.
We only tipped her out of her chair four times. The worst time was in front of the Old Country Buffet in Norcross. It was her favorite restaurant. She loved to eat, and they had every food imaginable there. It would take two plates to hold the heaping mountain of mashed potatoes with puddles of brown gravy spilling over the sides, macaroni and cheese, roast beef, fried chicken, two rolls and a piece of cornbread. I always thought it was weird that my mother never said anything to her about not having enough green on her plate. She was militant about my sister and I having the same number of greens to starches on our plates, but she never uttered a word about it to Aunt Oda.
My dad was pushing her that day because I wasn’t strong enough to keep her from flying at breakneck speed down the slope of the sidewalk. He was a big man with broad shoulders. He always dressed in a dress shirt, slacks and cowboy boots unless he was going hunting. His thick brown hair was combed down firmly in a curved swoosh on top of his head. I walked in my normal place with my hand on top of Aunt Oda’s arm when I felt her skin start to slide under my fingers. I glanced down and saw more details of the blue cushion that she sat on than usual as it squelched out further and further from the brown seat of the chair.
“Dad?”
My grandmother was griping as she waddled behind him about how long it took us to get to her house from church and Daddy was telling her to quit her bitching, that he was tired of it. My grandmother was the vertical, more stylish version of my aunt. She was stout, with tree trunk legs that continued its square shape up her torso. She had more of a neck than Aunt Oda, but that was because she didn’t sit in a chair all day for going on three decades. She had rounded plastic eyeglasses versus Aunt Oda’s angular ones, and my grandmother had the most beautiful soft white hair I ever saw. Aunt Oda must have been jealous of her for not being crippled and for having such beautiful hair, but if she was, I never heard her mention it.
“Dad!”
Aunt Oda’s eyes got huge underneath her black cat eye framed glasses as she let out a broken rasped “Whhooop!”
We all knew that sound. It was the start of the word “Whoopee!” that she made when she was either falling out of her chair or when the pinching claw that held her in place in the van would fail, releasing her wheelchair making her roll to the back of the van when we went up a hill. By the time we heard the whoop it was too late. She didn’t even get to the last syllable. Her knees hit first grinding into the pavement as her head toppled forward with a surge of gravity and she slammed her nose into the cracked sidewalk. My grandmother screamed at the sight of my aunt upended on the sidewalk, the breeze blowing the bottom hem of her dress that I never saw because it was always stuck up under her.
This presented another problem. It was then that I realized, as well as all of the people eating their meals alongside the windows of the restaurant, that Aunt Oda wasn’t wearing any underwear. Seeing how white and large her butt was, perched up in midair, I couldn’t help but giggle. Sissy swatted me upside the head, telling me to shut up. Miss Brannon who happened to be with us that day, padded off with her nurse shoes and fresh pressed nurse’s outfit into the restaurant away from the chaos without saying a word. My mother, who I will always admire for her bravery, wedged between my aunt’s bare ass and her wheelchair trying to cover as much as she could with her body, which was pretty much hopeless.
“Oh my God! Tommy! Look what you have done! Oda, Oda, are you ok?” My grandmother’s high-pitched screams at my father attracted anyone else to the scene that hadn’t already noticed the white flesh pyramid in a too short blue housecoat that was my upside down Aunt. I leaned over to look at her with her nose smushed almost flat against the sidewalk.
“What kind of a dumbass question is that Mama? She is lying face first in the cement! Molly, crawl down there and talk to her, see if she is conscious.”
I did as I was told, feeling bad about laughing, but I could tell she was conscious because she was moaning. I pressed my hands down onto the pebbled texture of the cement and saw the tears seeping out of her greasy eyes. There was an addled chorus of hollering over us going on between my parents, my grandparents and my sister. It was obvious that no one knew what to do.
“I’m sorry you got dumped out of your chair Aunt Oda. Daddy is trying to get you up,” I said in my most practiced, soft, Miss Brannon style voice.
“Ok,” she said, interrupting her own moaning. I wanted to try to hold her hand, but they were in their permanent position folded in front of her, now stuck between her body and the sidewalk.
The pavement was warm and rough under my hands, and I turned them over to look at them one at a time. They had pebbled imprints of the brash texture of the sidewalk on my now pink palms. I wondered if having a muddled complexion was going to add to Aunt Oda’s already troubled appearance. I was trying hard to think of something I could say, when all I wanted to ask her was why she wasn’t wearing any underwear. But since she was crying and I was already in trouble for laughing, I figured I had better not. I wadded up next to her, my nose pressed on the pavement and my butt in the air, trying to figure out what it must be like to know that I couldn’t get up.
“Do you want to talk about wrestling Aunt Oda?”
“Ok.” I could see that I had gotten the attention of her right eye at least, because it darted towards me. I still couldn’t see her left because it was blocked by her nose.
“Did you ever wrestle when you were younger before you were in a wheelchair?”
“No. Girls weren’t allowed to do that back then,” she paused for about a minute and I started to wonder if she was going to sleep. “I guess they still aren’t.”
“Did you watch it on TV when you were little?”
She grunted a little and I could tell she really wanted to shift herself but couldn’t. “No, we didn’t have TV when I was little. I was grown up and married by the time that came about.”
“Does your nose really hurt?”
“Yeah.”
My dad’s voice bellowed from above me. “Molly, as her if she thinks anything is broken.”
This confused me a little, because I knew she could hear him herself, it wasn’t like her ears were buried in the sidewalk like her nose, but I decided this wasn’t a good time to argue. “Daddy wants to know…”
“I heard him,” she said. “Tell him I don’t know. Everything hurts. More than usual.”
“She said she doesn’t know Daddy, but everything hurts.”
I could hear the pain in her voice so I went back to talking about wrestling. “Why do you like wrestling so much?”
Her right eye was staring right down at the cement and for a long time she didn’t even blink. Then she just closed her eye.
“I guess I don’t know, I never thought about it before.”
For someone that spent hours in front of the TV watching it, I couldn’t understand not knowing why. I expected her to gush about one wrestler over the other or how they were so strong and could jump and bounce off the sides of the rings, but she didn’t say any of those things.
“Do you like wrestling?” she asked me.
“Not really,” I said.
“Oh, ok. I guess that’s ok.” I could tell from her voice that she was a little disappointed. Maybe all those times that I sat there with her while she watched it on TV she thought I was doing it because I liked it too.
There was a lot about her that I couldn’t understand. Here was a woman who couldn’t move, that wore broaches on her house coat and terry cloth slippers with thick white elastic hose to help with the circulation in her legs and she watched wrestling. She lived for it. My dad always said that she probably liked to watch something so physical because it was foreign to her. I thought it was the dumbest thing on TV. All of the yelling and screaming, jumping and pouncing that they did with all of the stupid side stories to me that looked more staged than the Brady Bunch, but all of our outings had to be scheduled around wrestling. My grandmother called them her “stories,” but that was the same word that women called soap operas, and this was a far cry from Days of our Lives.
“This is so embarrassing,” my sister whined above us.
“Just go inside then. It’s not like it’s your bare ass shining out in public,” my dad snapped at her as he was trying to get an arm in around Aunt Oda’s belly to figure out how to hoist her up. Aunt Oda started whimpering. I raised my arm extending it as far as I could to try to pat her on the back. The tips of my fingers barely skidded across her cotton dress. Maybe she hadn’t realized before that her butt was exposed. I was also sure that her face and knees had to be hurting supporting all of that weight. Perhaps the pain was blocking out the breeze blowing across her bare butt.
My mom and grandmother both shouted “Tom!” at the same time because no one had mentioned out loud yet that she wasn’t wearing underwear. Maybe they were trying to pretend for Aunt Oda’s sake that we couldn’t see it, and my dad had doused their hopes.
My sister started sobbing and wailing an explanation. “That wasn’t what I meant! I meant that it was so embarrassing for Aunt Oda!” I rolled my eyes because I knew that wasn’t what she meant. My mother stretched her arm as far out to console my sister as she could without moving away from covering up Aunt Oda’s butt. “Pamela, it’s ok. Your father is just upset because he dumped her out.”
“Oh for crying out loud. It was an accident! It was that damn cushion! What dumbass put that thing there in the first place?” my father bellowed while bent over trying to get a grip on her shoulders.
My father was a big man but Aunt Oda was dead weight. On a normal day when she wasn’t lying face first on the pavement, she could only move her head and make lateral movements with her arms, like when we wedged a fork in between her fingers. She could raise it to her mouth, even though a lot of it would fall off in the process.
My father’s face turned the shade of a plum as he tried somehow to get some space between her and the sidewalk, but with every strain that he made, her moans became louder and she wasn’t moving even an inch.
“Oh yes Tommy, blame us for trying to make her comfortable! Why don’t you sit on your butt in a wheelchair for thirty years without any comfort and see how you feel?” My grandmother was not going to let him blame her, because we all knew that she was the one that bought the cushion.
“Well, of course you had to buy the one as slick as snot!” My dad said from his position on his knees trying to maneuver his hands somehow under her to see if he could get a grip to lift her up.
My granddad was gone. I assumed he was already making his way down the line of the buffet. I couldn’t blame him, I was hungry too. Everyone said that my grandfather had early dementia, but my dad always said that it was all an act so that he didn’t have to deal with my grandmother. If he acted like he was crazy, he could pretty much get away with anything he wanted.
“Where in the world is Miss Brannon?” my grandmother wondered out loud. “Isn’t this the kind of stuff we pay her for? Where did she go? Maybe she would know what to do.” She never wondered aloud where my granddad was. She didn’t care.
I was only ten at the time, but as much as I liked Miss Brannon, I couldn’t imagine her little four foot nothing frame helping the situation. Plus, she was old. Her hair was grey and her skin wrinkled in drapes of loose flesh down her neck. I asked my grandmother once how old she was, and I guess she knew why I was asking, because she said “older than Aunt Oda.” This made me feel worse for Aunt Oda. She was so helpless that a woman who was older than her was her caregiver. But they seemed to be pretty good friends. Well, Miss Brannon never seemed to mind Aunt Oda’s grouchiness at least. And Aunt Oda was less grouchy with her than any of the others. She always came back when the others wouldn’t. I often wondered when my grandmother and I would pick Miss Brannon up for her shifts in my grandmother’s white Chevrolet at the Oglethorpe Bus stop what would happen if Miss Brannon wasn’t there. But she always was. She would be sitting there in the Plexiglas covered bus stop in her white nurse’s uniform with her white nurse shoes and her little brown suitcase ready to go.
“Do you think we will get home in time to watch it today?” Aunt Oda’s mind was still on wrestling. Miss Brannon and her would sit in the dark in Aunt Oda’s living room, her wheelchair four feet from the TV, and they would watch channel 17 for about three hours every Saturday and Sunday night with half naked men grunting and writhing and trying to choke each other with their forearms. It used to drive my grandmother nuts because she was all about being “proper” but my dad told her to shut up and leave Aunt Oda alone, that the woman couldn’t do anything hardly, just to give her that one thing. I never saw my grandmother let up on much during her life, but she did finally leave that alone.
I kept talking to her about wrestling, with my right cheek against the hot sidewalk, telling her I was sure that we would be able to get her up soon so we could eat and take her home in time for her shows. That’s when I saw Miss Brannon’s white shoes coming toward me with a white and red checked tablecloth. She chunked it over Aunt Oda’s rear end to audible sighs of relief from my grandmother and my mom.
My dad started talking to several men that had woven their way through the small crowd gathered around the sideshow that was my family in front of the Old Country Buffett. I heard one of the men question in a quiet voice whether we needed to get a crane. I looked up at my sister who went completely white. I knew that she was picturing the same image I was. Firefighters in big black and yellow suits, lifting my poor aunt up off the cement in her upside down seated position unable to do anything about it, her butt blowing in the air beneath a tacked on red and white checked tablecloth under the giant white arm of the fire engine. My sister wanted her fifteen minutes of fame in a bigger way than any other person I knew, but she didn’t want it like that.
“Poor old soul,” I heard my mother mumble above me.
“No, I think we can lift her up, if there are enough of us. I don’t want to humiliate her any more if we can avoid it,” my father said. My mother touched me on the back, letting me know to get out of the way.
“I think they are going to lift you up Aunt Oda. Some men are going to help,” I told her quickly before leaving her.
“Ok,” she whimpered. “Love you doodlebug.”
“I love you too Aunt Oda.”
I moved back and stood between my sister and my grandmother. I noticed that Miss Brannon checked the brakes on Aunt Oda’s chair to make sure that if they got her in it, she wasn’t going to take off like a cannon down the sidewalk. Miss Brannon had such a quiet voice that it always sounded like she was whispering, but I heard her talk in a constant hum to my aunt as the men grabbed onto her.
“Grandma, why doesn’t Aunt Oda wear underpants?” I whispered.
I could tell that she was annoyed by my question, because she snorted out a gust of air. She wiped her eyes hard with her handkerchief. Since she was crying while everyone stood there, her energy spent with being helpless, she didn’t have any left to get mad at me for asking.
“Because when we have to use the lift to put her on the pot to go to the bathroom, panties just get in the way.”
“Oh,” I said.
She had two lifts in her house. One by the bathtub and one by the bed. The lift by the bed was the one they used several times a day, because they would sit her on a handicapped toilet seat in her bedroom for her to go to the bathroom. It had a forked extension that would roll under the bed or under the potty chair. They could lift her out of her chair after slipping two wide gray bands beneath her backside and her back keeping her in the seated position, raise her over the bed or the chair, and lower her down. Going to the bathroom anywhere besides her house was out of the question because no other place was equipped with lifts or doors wide enough for her to go through. Her house was equipped for her with short counters, and wide doorways. When they put her in bed each night, they would tilt her onto her side, where she would remain in that same seated position. The only variation each night she had was which side she wanted to lay on.
It took five men to lift her up into her chair in front of the restaurant. Miss Brannon pulled the tablecloth out from under her with the same finesse as a bullfighter just before her butt met the seat of the chair. My mother dusted the pebbles off Aunt Oda’s face while my sister ran in the restaurant to get Band-Aids for her knees and her nose. My dad was shaking all of the men’s hands while my grandmother cried and thanked them, explaining to all of them about Aunt Oda’s old Artheritis.
Aunt Oda smiled, but there was something else behind her eyes as I watched her that was unfamiliar to me.
I never knew her when she could walk, so I hadn’t known her smile, her laugh or even how tall she was before she was in her chair. I learned to crawl around and pull myself up on her silver metal wheels, my fingers gripping the gray hard rubber tires. My sister was six years older than me, but she didn’t know her before she was in her wheelchair either. We heard stories though. Stories of how she was one of the first people in the state of Georgia to undergo shock therapy for depression when she was young. Way before her arthritis. The one picture that Grandma had of Aunt Oda when she was younger, she said that Aunt Oda was about fifteen. It was hard to tell if she was sad in the picture because no one ever smiled for pictures back then. But the straight thin line of her lips cut through the oval white of her face and her olive shaped eyes were dark and unreflective. Her hair was pulled back tight in what I assumed was a bun on the back of her head and her suit looked grey and solemn. I tried to imagine her lying on a cold metal table hooked up to wires waiting to be shocked from a loud buzzing machine. I wondered how people thought that might cheer someone up.
My grandmother hated Aunt Oda’s husband Walt. I didn’t know him, because he died before I was born. Grandma said that it was just as well, because he was a waste of air. Sometimes I would stare at the picture Aunt Oda kept in her living room of her and Uncle Walt together at their 50th Wedding anniversary. She was in a wheelchair then too, and she was smiling. In my whole life, I had never seen her smile like that with so much brightness in her eyes, so it made me wonder if he was that bad after all.
She was a fixture in my family, just like the photo that was in her living room. Not a story of someone I didn’t know, but a physical being, another person to set a space for at the dining room table when we had holiday dinners. But there was a mystery to her life before her illness that I didn’t understand. I couldn’t help but wonder when the numb look started to reside within her. Whether it was when they hooked her up as a young girl to wires that would shock her brain, or whether the numbness had started before that, giving them reason to give in to such drastic measures. Regardless of when it was, it seemed like every time something else happened, the light in her eyes got even dimmer.
While my mom and Miss Brannon proceeded to load Aunt Oda back on the van, my dad came up beside me, slipping his arm over me making me fit well below his armpit. He was damp and sticky with sweat.
He led me inside to the shock of cool air inside the air-conditioned restaurant. He slid his foot up next to mine and pulled me up so that my feet were on top of his as we scooted down the line like penguins, our arms intertwined, and holding onto each other for balance.
“Daddy, is Aunt Oda going to die soon?”
I could feel his belly on my back tense up while he held his breath for a second. “I don’t know Molly. None of us are guaranteed another day. There is a saying though that old people die when the sap rises and falls on the trees.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, every spring the sap rises, meaning that’s when it flows. When the trees get sticky with the sap. In the fall it dries up, or ‘falls down.’ That is when the funeral homes fill up with old people. It’s a saying, but it’s one of those that always seems to be true. It’s like something inside of them is afraid for the cold winter to come or the heat of the summer to be on them, so their bodies just give up.”
I looked over the wall dividing the people in line from the rest of the people seated, and saw my Grandad at a big table by himself, two dirty plates stacked up in front of him with a wadded napkin on top of the plate, and another stuck into the front of his shirt like a bib. He was leaned back in his chair letting his food digest.
“So their minds sometimes give up before they die? Like, their bodies could be alive, but their spirit is already gone?”
I felt his arms lay heavier beside me and his feet slowed their pace. There was a long pause and the line in front of us was moving quicker than we were.
“I guess so baby. Sometimes,” he said quieter, sounding much more tired than before.
He looked over towards Grandaddy and chuckled in an awkward way. “Well, at least someone got to enjoy their dinner, huh?”
I giggled. “Yeah, I guess so.” I pressed my head and shoulders against his belly the closer that we got to the food line, my feet on top of his while I concentrated on matching his long strides, the soles of my ballet shoes sliding off the slick leather of his cowboy boots. I was trying my best to hold my balance connected to him with my arms looped into his for as long as I could.