Relics
Posted by Liz Perkins
Blocking out the sound was impossible; the shallow rasping breaths tread out the door one by one, indiscriminately hitting my eardrum, keeping the beat of their rotting death march with no sensitivity to who the observers may be. With each breath, a slight gurgle and a weak outcry of pain; Nana’s face contorts and the wrinkles around her eyes are raised with fear, she’s trying to speak…Hurry! She manages to get out. I herald my mother with her message.
I yell to her in the shower, I am going to call the ambulance, now! “No, no! Not the ambulance, the doctor first – his number is on the table.” I rush downstairs - there is nothing on the table. Shit! I fumble around in the mass of coupons and phone numbers my mother keeps behind the phone until I finally locate one that says, “Dr. Punchacar” and I hurriedly dial the number on the card – damnit! I fucked up! Hang-up, try again. Relax.
“Hello? Yes I’m calling on behalf of your patient, Mary Coakley? She needs to be admitted immediately, she’s having trouble breathing,”
“Mwah, mwah wmah…”
The Mass General emergency room is full. I call an ambulance from Winchester Hospital. I run upstairs and tell her, they are on their way! Don’t worry! My mother is gathering a bag with extra blankets and water.
I go into my room and lie on my bed and breathe. It is my great-grandmother, Ma’s bed. I lie on the very spot where she, Nana’s mother, my mother’s grandmother, died six years ago, where she died calling out for her own dead mother, sounding for the first time to me like a small child and not like an ancient woman. I say it is Ma’s bed and not was Ma’s bed because I do believe that she still inhabits it now and again, she has a penchant for making surprise appearances in my dreams when I sleep here. My last semester of college was a nightmare, I felt like I was going insane and maybe I was. “They don’t understand you Elizabetta, but I do,” she told me as I slept. I woke up with a wet face. In my dreams, she is not the 4’8”, 99 year old whisper of a woman she was when I last saw her in the waking world, but the 10’ tall, vivacious rock of my childhood. With her robust grip on my shoulders and her flaming red hair, I knew she was real and could feel that she really understood and I realized – I was not alone.
Straight ahead on my wall is my great-grandfather, Pa’s, hat. It’s a brown straw hat with a brim and a black ribbon around it. “Adam – Genuine Milan Weave” the label on the inside reads, Size 71/4. He was Ma’s husband and died before I was born. I hear he was a jovial fellow. Ma never took his hat off the hook by the door after he died. One day at Ma’s I asked my mother, “Whose hat is that?” and she told me it was my great-grandfather’s hat, and that Pa never left the house without that hat on his head, and when he would come home, he would smile big toothy smile and say “Ciao!”, and place the hat back on the hook by the door, because back then it wasn’t polite to wear a hat in the house. When Ma could no longer care for herself, and Nana could no longer care for Ma, Ma and Nana moved to my house so my mother could care for both of them, and my mother cared a lot. When we cleaned out Ma’s apartment I saved Pa’s hat from the fate of the dumpster…I knew Ma would want me to keep it, she was still waiting for Pa to come home. So I hung the hat on a hook on my bedroom wall. I wanted him to come home too.
I turn on the lamp by Ma’s bed, another rescued item, but this one is from Nana’s apartment. It’s a small lamp, perfect for bedside reading. The base of the lamp is a little Chinese girl in a red silk pantsuit with gold sandals and a big round straw hat, the kind for blocking out the sun when picking rice in the field. She stands with her hips pushed out so her belly looks big and round. She has raised eyebrows, a shiny face, and a happily un-westernized grin.
My cousin Henry and I often explored Nana’s apartment as children, two explorers lost in a land of old keys, model ships, fur coats, and home made electronic devices my grandfather had engineered. We used to try and imitate the Chinese girl’s face when we passed the lamp. “Chinese school has just begun no more laughing, no more fun. If you show your teeth or tongue, you will pay the penalty!!” The penalty being, for the loser in this case, that they must forfeit any claim to the title “captain” in the next game of space exploration. This was in fact, a very big deal because it was completely up to the captain to choose which alien planets we would explore and I didn’t get to explore outer space often because my brother had no interest in being on my space crew.
I flick the lamp on, and off, on….and off…on. Next to the lamp is a piggy bank or more accurately, a pineappley bank, dated July 4th, 1960 by a stamp on its back. The pineapple bank is shaped like a human bust with a pineapple for a head - a commemorative novelty item meant to celebrate Hawaii joining the United States. The bank was bought by Grandma, my father’s mother, most likely at a Cape flea market, which she often frequented before she died of lung cancer when I was six. When we would visit my grandparent’s house on Buzzards Bay, Grandma would take it down from the refrigerator, unscrew the bottom and empty all the pennies on the living room rug so my brother and I could put them back in the bank, one by one.
The pineapple man has a green sprout at the top of his head that’s supposed to be his hair, primary blue eyes, a small round nose, an open mouth with exposed teeth that are supposed to resemble a smile but looks more like a growl and a bumpy yellow rusting face. He wears a red white and blue collared shirt that says “50th” on the front of it. There is a lever behind his right arm. To insert money into the bank you place a coin on the pineapple man’s outstretched hand and you push the lever down. As the lever lifts his arm to his mouth, it also, quite morbidly, rolls his eyes back into the back of his head and lowers his deep red tongue so that the pineapple man can swallow all the Lincolns he can eat. I was quite horrified at this as a child – and maybe I am still horrified, especially by his eyes, his wide open blue eyes and the way they go all white as he eats the money.
I hold the bank on my lap, pushing the pineapple man’s arm up and down, watching his eyes roll forward and back listening to the metallic sounds of the mechanism. I place him back on the table, the red table which is also from grandma’s house, a red table with long crooked legs, a table built by Grandpa, and painted by Grandma. A red table that matches the Chinese girl’s red silk and the pineapple man’s red and white striped proud to be Americana shirt and now the red lights of the ambulance outside my window. They’re here Nana! I yell. The medics come upstairs; they tell Nana they can’t believe she’s really 82! She looks great! Nana laughs and smiles, she seems to be feeling a bit better. I crouch on the stairs and watch from between the banisters of the staircase as they carry her out to their ambulance, close the doors behind her and drive her away to the hospital.
Blocking out the sound was impossible; the shallow rasping breaths tread out the door one by one, indiscriminately hitting my eardrum, keeping the beat of their rotting death march with no sensitivity to who the observers may be. With each breath, a slight gurgle and a weak outcry of pain; Nana’s face contorts and the wrinkles around her eyes are raised with fear, she’s trying to speak…Hurry! She manages to get out. I herald my mother with her message.
I yell to her in the shower, I am going to call the ambulance, now! “No, no! Not the ambulance, the doctor first – his number is on the table.” I rush downstairs - there is nothing on the table. Shit! I fumble around in the mass of coupons and phone numbers my mother keeps behind the phone until I finally locate one that says, “Dr. Punchacar” and I hurriedly dial the number on the card – damnit! I fucked up! Hang-up, try again. Relax.
“Hello? Yes I’m calling on behalf of your patient, Mary Coakley? She needs to be admitted immediately, she’s having trouble breathing,”
“Mwah, mwah wmah…”
The Mass General emergency room is full. I call an ambulance from Winchester Hospital. I run upstairs and tell her, they are on their way! Don’t worry! My mother is gathering a bag with extra blankets and water.
I go into my room and lie on my bed and breathe. It is my great-grandmother, Ma’s bed. I lie on the very spot where she, Nana’s mother, my mother’s grandmother, died six years ago, where she died calling out for her own dead mother, sounding for the first time to me like a small child and not like an ancient woman. I say it is Ma’s bed and not was Ma’s bed because I do believe that she still inhabits it now and again, she has a penchant for making surprise appearances in my dreams when I sleep here. My last semester of college was a nightmare, I felt like I was going insane and maybe I was. “They don’t understand you Elizabetta, but I do,” she told me as I slept. I woke up with a wet face. In my dreams, she is not the 4’8”, 99 year old whisper of a woman she was when I last saw her in the waking world, but the 10’ tall, vivacious rock of my childhood. With her robust grip on my shoulders and her flaming red hair, I knew she was real and could feel that she really understood and I realized – I was not alone.
Straight ahead on my wall is my great-grandfather, Pa’s, hat. It’s a brown straw hat with a brim and a black ribbon around it. “Adam – Genuine Milan Weave” the label on the inside reads, Size 71/4. He was Ma’s husband and died before I was born. I hear he was a jovial fellow. Ma never took his hat off the hook by the door after he died. One day at Ma’s I asked my mother, “Whose hat is that?” and she told me it was my great-grandfather’s hat, and that Pa never left the house without that hat on his head, and when he would come home, he would smile big toothy smile and say “Ciao!”, and place the hat back on the hook by the door, because back then it wasn’t polite to wear a hat in the house. When Ma could no longer care for herself, and Nana could no longer care for Ma, Ma and Nana moved to my house so my mother could care for both of them, and my mother cared a lot. When we cleaned out Ma’s apartment I saved Pa’s hat from the fate of the dumpster…I knew Ma would want me to keep it, she was still waiting for Pa to come home. So I hung the hat on a hook on my bedroom wall. I wanted him to come home too.
I turn on the lamp by Ma’s bed, another rescued item, but this one is from Nana’s apartment. It’s a small lamp, perfect for bedside reading. The base of the lamp is a little Chinese girl in a red silk pantsuit with gold sandals and a big round straw hat, the kind for blocking out the sun when picking rice in the field. She stands with her hips pushed out so her belly looks big and round. She has raised eyebrows, a shiny face, and a happily un-westernized grin.
My cousin Henry and I often explored Nana’s apartment as children, two explorers lost in a land of old keys, model ships, fur coats, and home made electronic devices my grandfather had engineered. We used to try and imitate the Chinese girl’s face when we passed the lamp. “Chinese school has just begun no more laughing, no more fun. If you show your teeth or tongue, you will pay the penalty!!” The penalty being, for the loser in this case, that they must forfeit any claim to the title “captain” in the next game of space exploration. This was in fact, a very big deal because it was completely up to the captain to choose which alien planets we would explore and I didn’t get to explore outer space often because my brother had no interest in being on my space crew.
I flick the lamp on, and off, on….and off…on. Next to the lamp is a piggy bank or more accurately, a pineappley bank, dated July 4th, 1960 by a stamp on its back. The pineapple bank is shaped like a human bust with a pineapple for a head - a commemorative novelty item meant to celebrate Hawaii joining the United States. The bank was bought by Grandma, my father’s mother, most likely at a Cape flea market, which she often frequented before she died of lung cancer when I was six. When we would visit my grandparent’s house on Buzzards Bay, Grandma would take it down from the refrigerator, unscrew the bottom and empty all the pennies on the living room rug so my brother and I could put them back in the bank, one by one.
The pineapple man has a green sprout at the top of his head that’s supposed to be his hair, primary blue eyes, a small round nose, an open mouth with exposed teeth that are supposed to resemble a smile but looks more like a growl and a bumpy yellow rusting face. He wears a red white and blue collared shirt that says “50th” on the front of it. There is a lever behind his right arm. To insert money into the bank you place a coin on the pineapple man’s outstretched hand and you push the lever down. As the lever lifts his arm to his mouth, it also, quite morbidly, rolls his eyes back into the back of his head and lowers his deep red tongue so that the pineapple man can swallow all the Lincolns he can eat. I was quite horrified at this as a child – and maybe I am still horrified, especially by his eyes, his wide open blue eyes and the way they go all white as he eats the money.
I hold the bank on my lap, pushing the pineapple man’s arm up and down, watching his eyes roll forward and back listening to the metallic sounds of the mechanism. I place him back on the table, the red table which is also from grandma’s house, a red table with long crooked legs, a table built by Grandpa, and painted by Grandma. A red table that matches the Chinese girl’s red silk and the pineapple man’s red and white striped proud to be Americana shirt and now the red lights of the ambulance outside my window. They’re here Nana! I yell. The medics come upstairs; they tell Nana they can’t believe she’s really 82! She looks great! Nana laughs and smiles, she seems to be feeling a bit better. I crouch on the stairs and watch from between the banisters of the staircase as they carry her out to their ambulance, close the doors behind her and drive her away to the hospital.
This entry was posted by Ben Myers, on
Sunday, June 18, 2006.
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