Free Charms for the Easy Life by Kaye Gibbons Page A

Pasquotank County that afternoon, we passed the path that led through the woods to the home of Maveen’s sister. We turned around and drove down the path, talking all the way of how good it would be to see her. We had not hired a replacement. We had tried, but my grandmother turned candidates away midway through the interviews. When one after another of them was out the door, she would say, “I found her lacking.” After she did this five or six times, my mother gave up and announced that we would cook and clean for ourselves. The three of us cooked and ate like bachelors, and the only real challenge with our laundry was soaking blood out of garments.
    Maveen’s sister let us in. She didn’t greet us as much as grab and pull us through the long hall, saying, “I should’ve sent for you. I should’ve.” When she opened the door to Maveen’s tiny room, we saw the reason she was so alarmed. The room reeked of vomit. Maveen was asleep on her side, facing us, her mouth white-rimmed with bicarbonate. She looked to weigh sixty pounds. She had been a large, strong woman, raw-boned. My mother asked what was wrong with her, and her sister said, “She screamed for two weeks and then slacked off, and now something’s in her eating all her food, at least what doesn’t come back up. Whatever it is won’t let her have enough to eat. They say it’s tapeworm indigestion.”
    My grandmother asked, “Who is they ?”
    Maveen’s sister said, “Mr. Roosevelt’s crowd.” By this, she meant one of the public health clinics that had been established in county seats.
    My grandmother went over, leaned down, and gently ran her hands over Maveen’s stomach, palpating her as best she could through three layers of calico. Then she laid a hand on her forehead, frowning all the while, and when she stood up she said she would be back the next morning. She told Maveen’s sister to stop giving her bicarbonate or solid food and to strip her down and rub her with alcohol every three hours. My grandmother left quickly, my mother and I following at a trot. If we had not been able to keep pace with her, I believe, we would’ve been left. My grandmother was thoroughly preoccupied. As soon as the car doors shut, she told us that Maveen had cancer and would be dead in six weeks. She would starve to death.
    We asked my grandmother what she intended to do. She told us she was going to ask the real doctor, the one whose career she had spared, to admit Maveen to the hospital, where she could be more comfortable. When we got back home, my grandmother went right in and called him at his house. She answered his questions calmly at first: “She’s seventy. She’s lost probably a hundred pounds. Distended abdomen. Temperature of a hundred and three or thereabout. No, no sign of pain now, but I’m sure there’s intestinal paralysis. I’m worried about rupture. She’s got to be hospitalized right now.” When she disagreed with his response, she tried not to shout. She spoke in a high, thin voice. “I don’t believe it! It would take nothing for you to do this. You’d better watch out! Soon I might not be the only one around here practicing without a license.”
    She slammed the phone down, plopped down at the kitchen table, and mimicked him. “The only thing that goes wrong below an old colored woman’s waist is fibroids. That, and too much grease. Let’s keep on with the bicarbonate.”
    We went back to Maveen’s house the next morning. I remember packing a snack of graham crackers and apple butter and putting a copy of The Mill on the Floss in the bag to read if I had any spare time. As it turned out, I had no time to read, and afterward I associated the book so much with Maveen that I could never bear to finish it. When I walked into her room with my grandmother I was startled to see her completely naked body. She lay curled like a baby with her arms up over her head, a bad-luck sleeping position that means a person is calling trouble. In