What’s in Your Trunk?

Laid to Rest in Suit Number Nine

The enormity of her pathology announced itself when Mama opened Great-Granddaddy’s trunk and held up dozens of lustrous pajama sets to bear witness to me. They had no weight yet filled the trunk like flags of small, significant nations.

“I wore this for my Mastectomy! This one was my Rib Removal.” The aqua gown was Hip Replacements; pink with three-quarter sleeves, a Complete and Total Hysterectomy. Swallowing Test was green, Congestive Heart Failure pale yellow, Prednisone Overdose lavender, Six Weeks in Traction light blue. Fibromyalgia was aqua again, life’s unerring cycle starting anew. Fifty-six in all, each caressed like a mother remembers milestones while folding her baby’s clothing.

Mama turned to me. “I have to clean this house out before I die. Do you want Great-Granddaddy’s trunk?”

*

She had started giving me family heirlooms a few years back when Death from Aggravated Endometriosis seemed imminent. The family Bible, Uncle Frog’s Grand Prize barbecue recipe, her first corsage from Daddy. This divestiture started when Daddy died, though the years leading up to that moment were a divestiture of another sort: here, Doctor, take this breast, this uterus, this collarbone, this rib; put me in traction, give me overdoses of prednisone, tell me I have congestive heart failure, cancer, fibromyalgia, osteoporosis, rosacea. Catalog my pain.

There are no floors in Grace Hospital that Mama can’t recall with awful precision. Arriving for the last emergency (Unexplained Swelling), my husband and I were met with a torrent of words: “I was in room 210 when I had my Rib Removal in 1964.”

*

I grew up near a factory that makes a style of lingerie called Shadowline, silky pajama sets required in hospital beds because the preacher and his entourage of smiling Deacons were always expected and always came (except for once after her Exploratory Abdominal Surgery when the Morganton Sluggers made it to the Little League World Series in Williamsport). Their coming required the woman in question to look sickly enough to warrant their visit but also to look somewhat dainty. Shadowline was the lingerie of choice.

*

Mama leaned over the trunk. The first layer was newspaper articles. She turned to me, a yellowed clipping in her hand. “This is when our neighbor was arrested for cocaine trafficking! And here’s the one about Mr. Snow being sent to prison for what he did to those boys at the Children’s School!”

“That sure was terrible,” I said. There sure are a lot of men in orange prison jumpsuits for such a small Southern Baptist town, I thought.

“And here’s Ron’s obituary. He was funny—and not funny ha- ha,” she said with that small-mouthed look reserved for anything remotely sexual. Ron was fastidious, a man who cataloged the leftovers in his fridge, measured between his tomato plants, numbered his suits, and lived alone.

When he died in his corduroy Barcalounger, a list was found inside his closet, a digit for each of the 68 possible suit and tie combinations complete with tidy notations detailing which Sunday that particular combination was worn. “The preacher said Ron was laid to rest in Suit Number Nine,” she explained.

Ah, I thought, nine lives, nine symphonies, nine planets, the harmony of harmony. I fumbled for something to say, surprising myself with what I did say, nearly a direct quote from Buddha, thanks to Books on Tape: “Well, Mama, what is the appropriate behavior for a man or a woman in the midst of this world, where each person is clinging to his piece of debris? What’s the proper salutation between people as they pass each other in this flood?”

Her eyes widened as she adjusted her hearing aid. “Estaleen says I ought to wear a wig because my hair’s so thin after all that Prednisone. What do you think?”

“I think your hair looks good,” I said softly, looking around the bedroom where we were excavating the trunk. Oddly, as willing as she was to have body parts lopped off, she just as quickly added things back. That night alone, I counted bifocals, an arm brace, wrist brace, metal hips, prosthetic breasts, Depends undergarments, walker, cane, Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation device, neck brace, hearing aids, wig, and magnets from the front of her refrigerator that she taped on her legs to help her arthritis. She had read about magnet therapy in Reader’s Digest and saw no reason her magnets shaped like fire hydrants and Garfield wouldn’t do.

“But if you’re not happy with your hair, I can help you pick out a nice wig,” I offered, entertaining myself momentarily with mental snapshots of Mama in the check-out line at Harris Teeter’s in a fine black Afro or Farrah Fawcett’s old hair.

“I ordered one of those back braces that make you sit up straight. QVC had them, and you know how my Osteoporosis has hunched my shoulders over. See?”

I had an almost irrepressible urge to lunge at Mama and put her out of her misery, strangle her with the pink Pericarditis and Pleural Effusion nightgown, fold her like Shadowline into Trunk Number Nine, and be done with it. What had damaged her so irretrievably that she couldn’t even commit to sitting up straight?

“I would love to have all the Shadowline unless you still need them,” I said, testing the water. It was the quickest I had seen her in years; a rapid flicker of fear shadowed her face at the thought of losing those talismans, those anchors, those butter mint-colored life jackets. I expected her to say no. When I glanced at her again, she was laughing; she looked oddly luminous, glinting like debris on water in bright sunlight. And in that instant, that illuminating and clarifying and awful moment when her mouth was open, I could see she really did need Extensive and Comprehensive Dental Work, the one thing she hadn’t asked for.

What’s in your trunk?