Free Swim by Jennifer Weiner Page B

and emerge, in their kitchen or living room, dressed in my robe and pajamas and slippers, unbroken and unscarred, just a regular eight-year-old girl
    Dorothy, in her tunic and loose-fitting pants, would raise an eyebrow. “Well, where did you come from?” she’d ask.
    “Oh, leave her alone,” Rose would say, bustling over with a cup of cocoa. “Poor thing, she’s up way past her bedtime!”
    “Picture it,” Sophia would begin. “When I was a young girl back in Italy . . .”
    “Not this one again,” Blanche would say, swooping into the room in a silk peignoir and high-heeled mules. She’d perch on the overstuffed couch and then pat the cushion, inviting me to sit beside her. “Come here, honey. Take your shoes off. Stay awhile.”
    When the show was over, Grandma and I would make up stories. What if Sophia and the rest of the Girls took a trip back to Italy? What would happen if Blanche got married again and moved away? What was Dorothy’s son like, and would we ever get to see him? What if he moved to Florida, too, and fell in love with Blanche’s daughter? (Dorothy’s son eventually did arrive, and turned out to be gay, a revelation that sailed right over my eight-year-old head.) Grandma would bring me notebooks, leather-bound in robin’s-egg blue and pale pink, sometimes with the words MY DIARY in scrolling gold script on the cover. She’d bring boxes of felt-tipped pens, black and red and blue. “Write it down,” she would tell me. “Tell me a story.” When I’d complain that I didn’t know how to spell a word, didn’t know how to say what I wanted, or that I was tired, she’d put the pen in my hand, open the notebook to a fresh page, and say, “You’re not being graded. Just try.”
    So we would watch, and, when I felt well enough, I would write the continuing adventures of the Golden Girls, sometimes guest-starring Grandma and me. Roommates would come and go, kids with broken legs or tonsil issues, just passing through. Once, I shared a room with a teenager recovering from her high-school-graduation-gift nose job. They wheeled her in just after a nurse had finished changing my bandages. The curtain was open, and, for a moment, we regarded each other. Both of her eyes were blackened, and her nose was in a splint, but, from her response, I guessed that I looked even worse. “Jesus, what happened to you?” she asked in a froggy, nasal voice, taking in my eye patch and the bandages on my cheek. Her parents shushed her. Grandma glared and jerked the curtain shut. The next morning, the girl was gone, and Grandma and I and our television set were alone again.
    The summer slipped by in a syrupy, pain-spiked haze. It was a season without weather, because the hospital was always air-conditioned to the point of chilliness, a summer without any of the usual markers, picnics or fireworks or trips to the beach. On operation days, nurses would wake me up before dawn and wheel me into the operating room without so much as a sip of water. (“Why so early?” I asked, and my grandmother would make an uncharacteristically cynical face and said, “The doctors don’t want to miss their tee times.”) “You ready to go?” Grandma would whisper, bending close to me. Those mornings she didn’t bother with her makeup. I could see wrinkles around her lips, fanning out from the corners of her eyes, and deep grooves in her forehead and stretching from her nose to the corners of her lips. Her hair was still dark then—she dyed it, I knew; when I was home I’d help her brush the solution onto the spots she couldn’t reach. She was old, and the doctors and fathers who’d give the pretty nurses appreciative looks all ignored her, but to me, she was beautiful. I knew how she had looked, the beauty she’d once been. That beauty, I thought, was still there, like a layer of a shell hidden under subsequent accretions of mother-of-pearl, still there, if you looked closely enough.
    “Remember,” she would tell me,