sleep before eleven and always woke up minutes before the rising sun
entered the room. She'd taken such pleasure in sleeping when she was
young that her inability to sleep tired her in an abstract way. It marked
her as old, along with the diabetes, the partial blindness, the changes in
the community around her. When she was younger, when Lucien had
been alive and her children had been growing up, some of her uncles and
brothers had been angry, unreasonable chronic drunks. She knew some
of her kids smoked weed. But the crackheads and drugs that seemed to
steal the sense from people, these were new. It made her feel weary and
worn to sit on the porch and squint out at the small dark spots she could
see passing back and forth on the street, a few lonely, solitary crackheads
searching for dealers, cousins or neighbors' children that walked the road
and looked to her like flies crawling across a screen.
She did not like the slow ache of all her movements. It bothered her
that she often dreamt in a language that no one around her spoke any
longer, that she woke still thinking in creole French, to a wide, lonely bed,
an emptying house. Her boys could not understand this. She was afraid of
the lethargic feeling that washed over her sometime that reminded her of
floating in water. She'd feel it while sitting in the chair in front of the TV
staring at the blobs of color and light as she listened to one of the boys
describing a show for her, and it made her want to close her eyes, to blink
slowly, and just stop moving. Later, when she'd lie in bed at night with
her rosary in her hand before she went to sleep and fingered the plastic
beads, the litany of our fathers and hail mary's, she'd absently think that
it was death approaching. She thought of gathering Spanish moss with her mother as a young child to stuff their mattresses with and pausing
to look up at the sky when she was in a patch of sunlight to realize that
the sun was not blinking on and off, but rather, clouds were moving
quickly through the sky. They were passing between her and the sun and
impeding the light. This is what these fits of lethargy and utter exhaustion
felt like to her: a shadow passing over her, a scuttling cloud obscuring her
from the sun of life.
It was tentative, the first touch. It was no more than a tap, really,
there on the left side of her calf. It stung a little through the sheet. The
day would be hot like all the rest. She lay there for a minute, felt the touch
spread, felt the stinging bear down on her leg, and pushed herself up and
out of the bed. It was time to get up. Paul had bought a couple of pounds
of shrimp to the house the night before. She wanted to clean and cook
them before the worst heat of the day, before they began to turn to meal
and stink like warm flesh and sea salt. She pulled on a gown, and didn't
bother with socks or slippers. She'd rather go barefoot.
Even though she had memorized the contours of the house long ago
through habit, it still comforted her to feel her way through the rooms
with her feet, to know that the facets of the house existed as absolutes
even though it all looked to her as if she had her eyes open underwater.
When she noticed the blurriness the first time, that's what she had
thought, that there was excess water in her eye: tears, maybe. Things like
that happened to older people. When she awoke the next morning, it
was still there: a watery film. She denied it, afraid. She prayed and waited
until she woke up one morning and realized the edges had been washed
out of everything. She was drowned. Ma-mee walked to the kitchen in a
sliding shuffle: carpet, wood of the hallway, scratchy carpet of the living
room, the uneven tile of the kitchen.
Ma-mee heard it: a body rising, someone awake, one of the boys
moving around in their room. She placed the plastic bag of shrimp in the
sink, plugged the drain, and turned on the water so the ice could melt, so
the
entered the room. She'd taken such pleasure in sleeping when she was
young that her inability to sleep tired her in an abstract way. It marked
her as old, along with the diabetes, the partial blindness, the changes in
the community around her. When she was younger, when Lucien had
been alive and her children had been growing up, some of her uncles and
brothers had been angry, unreasonable chronic drunks. She knew some
of her kids smoked weed. But the crackheads and drugs that seemed to
steal the sense from people, these were new. It made her feel weary and
worn to sit on the porch and squint out at the small dark spots she could
see passing back and forth on the street, a few lonely, solitary crackheads
searching for dealers, cousins or neighbors' children that walked the road
and looked to her like flies crawling across a screen.
She did not like the slow ache of all her movements. It bothered her
that she often dreamt in a language that no one around her spoke any
longer, that she woke still thinking in creole French, to a wide, lonely bed,
an emptying house. Her boys could not understand this. She was afraid of
the lethargic feeling that washed over her sometime that reminded her of
floating in water. She'd feel it while sitting in the chair in front of the TV
staring at the blobs of color and light as she listened to one of the boys
describing a show for her, and it made her want to close her eyes, to blink
slowly, and just stop moving. Later, when she'd lie in bed at night with
her rosary in her hand before she went to sleep and fingered the plastic
beads, the litany of our fathers and hail mary's, she'd absently think that
it was death approaching. She thought of gathering Spanish moss with her mother as a young child to stuff their mattresses with and pausing
to look up at the sky when she was in a patch of sunlight to realize that
the sun was not blinking on and off, but rather, clouds were moving
quickly through the sky. They were passing between her and the sun and
impeding the light. This is what these fits of lethargy and utter exhaustion
felt like to her: a shadow passing over her, a scuttling cloud obscuring her
from the sun of life.
It was tentative, the first touch. It was no more than a tap, really,
there on the left side of her calf. It stung a little through the sheet. The
day would be hot like all the rest. She lay there for a minute, felt the touch
spread, felt the stinging bear down on her leg, and pushed herself up and
out of the bed. It was time to get up. Paul had bought a couple of pounds
of shrimp to the house the night before. She wanted to clean and cook
them before the worst heat of the day, before they began to turn to meal
and stink like warm flesh and sea salt. She pulled on a gown, and didn't
bother with socks or slippers. She'd rather go barefoot.
Even though she had memorized the contours of the house long ago
through habit, it still comforted her to feel her way through the rooms
with her feet, to know that the facets of the house existed as absolutes
even though it all looked to her as if she had her eyes open underwater.
When she noticed the blurriness the first time, that's what she had
thought, that there was excess water in her eye: tears, maybe. Things like
that happened to older people. When she awoke the next morning, it
was still there: a watery film. She denied it, afraid. She prayed and waited
until she woke up one morning and realized the edges had been washed
out of everything. She was drowned. Ma-mee walked to the kitchen in a
sliding shuffle: carpet, wood of the hallway, scratchy carpet of the living
room, the uneven tile of the kitchen.
Ma-mee heard it: a body rising, someone awake, one of the boys
moving around in their room. She placed the plastic bag of shrimp in the
sink, plugged the drain, and turned on the water so the ice could melt, so
the
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