Never the Liver

I wrote this when I was... younger. As in 22 years old. It was about my grandmother dying. Who died of congestive heart failure about three years after I wrote this and whom never had liver failure (despite being a recovered gin addict.) Also, I have never had a sister in law but I do have two sisters.

I share this juvenile writing because I am away and lazy, but mostly because I have finally found the editors I needed (same age as the me I was then, but smarter) and also because there is some part of this kid story that makes me sad and wistful. And also the two brilliant young editors said to go for it. And I am nothing if not a girl who supports the um, er, "youth":

"You talk in tiny explosions about everything else but the liver. You are pleased to board the plane with both of the babies, the baby gear and the two mothers, one your sister, the other your brother’s wife. While it doesn’t take your mind off the liver completely, the flight and the bother with baby carriages and car seats fill up the liver-less space. Changing diapers in tiny airplane seats is easier and almost fun. Poop examinations replace liver dialogue.

At the condominium complex, where you eventually arrive, your grandmother has aged markedly. She is covered in black and red spots, like ink exploded all over her body. They blink at you from every available inch of showing skin but seem worse on her hands. Your mother has brown spots on hers, from twenty years of birth control pills she says, but the flat black marks of your grandmother’s are different and menacing. Her huge silver rings don’t make up for the blemishes, but now that she’s not smoking, your grandmother’s hands are mostly in her pockets, underneath the newspaper, stuffed behind a pillow. Luckily, her face is mostly spared from the spots. You can still look her in the eye and smile, as if nothing has changed, as if the liver is still deep maroon and working.

At the pool, your sister and your sister in law take their babies swimming. One baby floats around the water like a fleshy buoy. The other baby, older and already wild, splashes and laughs and nearly drowns himself. Your mother takes pictures with the video camera, shouting as if to a dog. Here baby, over here, she says, slapping the water. You lie next to the pool’s edge, covered in towels and sun block, pretending to read a trashy book. Sometimes, you get in the water and hold one of the babies or twirl them both around in circles. You think you look young and beautiful this way but the video replay shows you fat and peeling. Your mother scans your face through the viewer, focusing in with the telephoto. She stops the film when she notices you have too much on your mind. Your grandmother does not visit the pool. Her feet are too swollen and she can’t get her shoes on.

You watch your mother’s face twist when she calls your father long distance. He wants updates, flight arrivals and advice on renting hospital beds. You watch your mother as she struggles to hold in the tears that are lodged in her throat like hard candy. Your father wants details but your mother can’t remember what the doctor said exactly. There are no details really, just the liver.

To get away, your mother and you travel to the beach to watch the sunset and drink beer. She doesn’t say much. You realize after ten minutes of spilling your romantic guts that she hasn’t heard a word you have said. If you felt comfortable expressing love, you might have hugged her. Instead, you motion toward a flock of three kinds of different sea gulls. One group is gray and grimy. Another is red headed with tiny plumes on the top of their heads. The last group is speckled with gray and white and brown and a little red. The gulls stand facing the same direction, like soldiers. It’s as if they are waiting for something big to blow down the beach.

You mention that it’s nice to see them all perched together, all interlocked genetically and getting along. Your mother suggests that maybe they are not all gulls. You say that could be true, but it looks good, doesn’t it?

She says, It does. She says she might like to paint all those birds someday.

At the condominium complex, the baby has choked on a cookie. The baby cries constantly; he is teething. The cookie is supposed to soothe his aching gums but he has bitten right through it, which you thought was impossible; the thing is like baked leather, hard brown plastic, a chew toy. Your sister and your sister in law seemed pleased to tell you this story – how his face turned red, how they panicked and how, just in time, the baby swallowed the cookie right down. Your sister in law wonders whether his poops will change color. You know, she says, he’s only eating strained peas and chicken puree.

Consulting baby rearing texts fills up the evening. In bed at night, you feel relieved. A whole day gone and never the liver.

When your sister and your sister in law were pregnant, you memorized health books and learned the names of diseases. You learned to recognize brain stems on x-rays. You knew the sizes of fetal hands at every stage of development and you could measure the skull of a fetus from the size of a woman’s belly. You plotted the spaces in which your sisters walked like an engineer. Move, you’d whisper, we are carrying children here. Their spines are only so big and they are fragile.

You never quite knew what was happening until you held the first baby in your arms and until you saw your sister cry because she felt so inadequate when the breast milk wouldn’t come in. This was so much more than medicine.

At the condominium complex after the pool one day, your lover calls because he is concerned and feels, already, married to you. When the phone rings, your sister in the law yells from the porch – whose husband is it? – and when you hear your lover’s voice at the other end, you are not at all sure how to answer.

Like your sister’s husband and like your brother, your lover avoids the liver. The men have learned how to behave in this situation. Your lover brought you flowers when he came to take you to the airport. In the car on the way he laid out some tired speech about the ebb and flow of living. You rolled down the window to drown out in him what you do not love: the rushing air and the other cars shushed him.

But over the phone long distance, you can smile as you tell your lover about the old couple at the pool. They were friendly and deeply tanned and smoking long brown cigarettes. You tell him these kinds of cigarettes always look better in the hands of older people. You tell him about the wife saying to you that the pool seemed abnormally hot.

She asked the pool keeper if he had turned up the heat but the pool keeper told her that the May sun was making the water so warm.

Can you just imagine how horrid it must be in June and July, she said to you.

She won’t even be here in June and July, her husband butts in, for God’s sake, we’re leaving in three weeks to get back to Minneapolis, but she needs something to gripe about.

The wife craned her neck to look at you, her eyes above her brown sunglasses rolling to the side to gesture at her husband: Oh, you crab ass, she said.

You tell your lover later that the dialogue seemed right out of someone’s short story. Your lover agrees. Just like life, he says. You don’t point out the irony of his comment. He is making you happy.

For dinner, you do your mother a favor and cook your vodka Chinese chicken specialty. Your grandfather joins you all, but your grandmother stays home. She feels nauseous. Your sister coos to her baby throughout the meal; your sister in law mentions the book she just read; your mother putters with the food on her plate, saying oh this is good, good, good; your grandfather does not talk. His face is drooped over the plate, hung there silently. His eyes are glazed. He looks heart broken and sacrificed. Near the end of the meal, he apologizes for his gloominess and mutters something else, under his breath, swallowing it down before it even gets out there. You have never seen your grandfather cry. You have never seen your mother squeeze his hand the way she does. You wish the baby would choke again. You wish the baby needed her diaper changed. You wish the old couple from the pool would barge in – You crab ass.

Your mother ships all of you home. She knows there is no need for you at the condominium complex anymore.

Boarding the airplane is a nightmare. You have become, all at once, husband and nanny. You are heavy with two strollers, two car seats slung over both your shoulders and a diaper bag hung dangerously around your neck. They let you and your sister and your sister in law and the two babies get on the plane first. Even the people in wheelchairs nod at you sympathetically.

Your sister and your sister in law lock the babies into the car seats and then the car seats into the plane seats. In the compartment above, you stuff the compacted carriages. The diaper bags go underneath the seats in front of you. As the other passengers board the plane, you begin to settle in, pull out the magazines, get your gum. Your sister in law complains that the noisemaker is going to keep the baby awake. You laugh because by noisemaker she means engine and because she once wrote a 250-page dissertation on gender and economic re-growth in South American mountain societies. Birth has dulled her wits. She barely catches on to what she says.

A man boards the plane with a beer cooler. Coolers this size remind you of transplants and the way he carefully carries the container makes you wonder whether a lung’s inside, or a kidney. Livers are hard to come by. Sometimes you wish your grandmother needed a new heart. You feel like there is something symbolically friendly about hearts. You think that if the heart was the thing, you all might talk about it and even profusely, in romantic ways. Your lover might make sugary analogies about too much love for one old heart to hold. Instead, the liver stinks like gin and vermouth and too many afternoon bridge games and reminds you that your mother cooked dinner nearly every night when she was a kid because your grandmother was asleep on the couch by 4 o’clock. A heart might have ticked out quietly. The liver rots.

Mid-flight your sister feeds the baby. The baby drains the bottle quickly leaving bubbles and burpy messes on your jeans where you have laid her to spill out the gas. Your sister stares out the window. She turns to you and says, It’s weird: we’re moving so fast but it doesn’t seem like we’re moving at all. You nod at her. Her eyes seem puffy. She started smoking again and has decided not to go back to her job at the bank.

The babies' ears pop and they start wailing. Trauma at the right time, you think: your sisters seem as content as you to leave it alone.

The flight crew makes you wait until everyone has departed before you can start packing up to leave. The man swings the cooler over his shoulder like a shotgun. When the plane is mostly empty, except for you and the sisters and the babies and the wheelchair people, you begin to slowly lift the carriages out of the overhead compartments. You hang the diaper bag again across your neck. You grab one car seat, then the other.

You smile and nod and carry on down the aisle."