In cold winter’s soak, it throbs, but taps soft cotton numb on the table. There is my missing fingertip, now reattached. “It’s like trying to find a needle in a pound of hamburger.” When the doctor went back in to repair the damage, he couldn’t. The hammock failed its netting disintegrated in shreds that floated throughout her body like rotting flotsam. The doctor said, “We’ll put your bladder up nice and high in a hammock.” I always imagined the hammock rainbow striped, festive and beachy. To cure her incontinence, my mother had a same-day bladder sling surgery. They sit like a solid metal clothesline above my stomach and protect me. Amy and I text when one of us coughs up the rare tonsil stone we try to describe the smell to each other when we pinch the tiny white nodule between our fingers-like an armpit, a cave, a sharp yeasty bit of cauliflower. My favorite show is Monsters Inside Me once a boy fell on the beach, skinned his knee on coral and a seashell grew inside him. My sister, Amy, and I like to watch bot fly removals on youtube-the squirming bloody ooze to freedom, the wet gaping hole after tweezer extraction. My bras are now a lace-netted mismatch: one low-hanging pear next to a globular cantaloupe, pressing for all they’re worth against underwire. Or swell the left breast to a rotund 34DD. No one told me that nursing two babies could shrink my right breast down to a droopy 34C. We listened to Van Morrison with the windows open in winter, me upside down, my feet tipped up against the wall, trying to make someone.
Sometimes lavender blooms in my peripheral vision like wet soggy lilacs and I must emergency lie down.įor so many years, I tried not to get pregnant, and then, later, I tried so hard to get pregnant. Let’s call it an implosion of grief over the loss of my parents so young, so quickly, one after the other like dominoes.
It doesn’t tap but whispers its force that will hit me hard later. There’s a little hammer that lives above my left eye. I was bad at it- five, six years old-but the soft velvety flour on my hands, the solid wood rolling pin, planted me safe and sure, and from behind, she’d hug me and call me her “little peanut.” She smelled like butter. My Grandma Lucille wrapped a dishtowel around me, stood me on a chair, and set me to work rolling out pie dough.
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