how are the birds? :)

Azura Tyabji

I’m rubbing Grandma’s feet as she watches another detective show. Arthritic, she bought this machine off Amazon to do the same thing to her hands. In old age, women become untouchable. Grandma’s calves are supple with stationary blood and I knead my worry into them. Every vein I touch maps what time will do to me. Now that I’m old, nothing matters! she laughs, pats my silly limpened hand.

We go out for brunch to celebrate January. I’m old enough to order drinks now. Grandma tells me to get bright sugared things she says she wouldn’t usually indulge in as a diabetic; grapefruit and blood orange cocktails, french toast we share from the same plate. She tells me, pressing her toast into a pool of syrup, that she was never her mother’s favorite. She was born crying and never stopped. Her mother paced the dirt floor to dust and their neighbors kicked in their ceiling. She kept howling, ignored and gumless. Teeth now petrified in a cup by her bedside. I learned very quickly that at least I could be useful, she says as a girl she helped her mother burn toast less. She set the table for eight, corralling every son her mother pushed out shrieking after her. She shut the storm windows and prayed secretly to leave Kansas and finally be alone to cry. It is not a mother’s job to love, just to keep every crying mouth fed. We go home. I rub my fingers in Grandma’s gray. Her memory is fiercely intact underneath her hair, thin as the wings of the hummingbird she leaves sugar water out for all year. How a hummingbird finds her in the burnt heart of downtown is a miracle I couldn’t explain. Searching for sweetness, girls become women become girls again. Age brought the freedom they dreamt of. When I realize my age, I feel like an hourglass realizing she’s hit the ground, spilling her precious sand down the drain. Soon, time will knead me free of what I wanted. Grandma’s lifetime earned her dream apartment, with the hummingbirds and oceanview and brunch around the block, and all I think about is how many corners she could fall in and not be found for a week.

The women in my family like to be alone and that loneliness has slowly petrified me. You go to sleep one night and wake up in yet another night, in your own sweat, your own dark, your own silent dreamhouse you thought you built for yourself to enjoy. No one can touch you.

I leave for college and Grandma mails me three pounds of birdseed and a birdhouse that won’t fasten on my studio apartment window. how are the birds? :) she texts, and I tell her they are eating well this winter. She does not know the birdhouse is in cardboard purgatory under my bed. I throw the seeds of the ground whenever I remember to, and the squirrels look at me with skeptical interest, and the crows cry in a language I can’t understand. I rubbed lotion on the red scar the IV left in her arm and then I left. I left. There is no time left for me to think of Grandma and not follow through on her gifts. Spring and hunger are at my table. I scatter the seeds. Some might hook on the dirt floor and grow, or at least they will be useful to something smaller than myself.

Grandma calls herself the Harbormaster for all the ships she watches come and go outside her apartment. There are two squirrels that live outside mine. A thrush of sparrows that gossip by the bike rack. The same piece of notebook paper lies at the foot of a maple, weathered illegible by storms. I was so excited one day I saw a cardinal perched alone outside my window. Bright as a pricked finger. A brief daughter of red and then she was gone.