Charms for the Easy Life Read Online Free PDF

and I sank down onto the bottom step of the child’s house. Terror and nausea struck together and held me down, for how long I cannot say. I remember holding my knees up to my chest, feeling the new rises in my black dress, and saying to my mother and grandmother through my tears, “Ida was so proud of her brassiere.” I looked up at my grandmother, and for the first time in my life this woman who doled out compassion in thimblefuls took my hands and pulled me up into her chest and said, “You’re my little bird. If we don’t go in, you’ll always wonder.”
    I walked through the house sandwiched so tightly between my mother and grandmother that had I lifted my feet off the floor I would’ve been carried along. I clung to my grandmother’s dress so hard that later in the evening she asked my mother to repair the rip underneath her sleeve. She didn’t sew, or wouldn’t. We went directly to the coffee urn and then took our seats. My grandmother poured swallows of coffee into her saucer for me. I wasn’t the only child there. Three children from the community had been scrubbed raw and starched in gum arabic and were sitting bolt upright on the sofa. As I sat and stared at the brown spots on my grandmother’s hand, one of the children began to cough. She had what we called smothering sickness, and there with the room so stifling-thick with oil smoke and camphor, she struggled to breathe. Her mother snapped from across the room, “For Jesus’ sake, take a deep breath!” My grandmother told me to sit and be still, and she went over to the child and rubbed her back and told her how to breathe on slow counts of “one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi.” The child’s mother said, “Thank you, Charlie Kate. I hope I don’t owe you anything.” My grandmother didn’t react to this at all. She came back and sat beside me and said, “When you’re ready to go over by Ida, tell me. Otherwise, we’ll drink all their coffee and go home.”
    If I craned my neck, I could see the coffin well enough from where I sat. I forced myself to do this once. Ida had always been such a slip of a thing, with pale gray eyes and a tiny uplifted nose, both of which she despised and yearned to trade for what my mother had always termed my aggressive features. Because of the way she was propped, I could see only the ruffles on her favorite dress, and her beautiful nose. She seemed to be sniffing the air above her, which curdled with the camphor and the corned beef and cabbage her mother boiled perpetually. I couldn’t see this from where I sat, but I assumed that her leftover medicine was beside her, brown bottles of tonic my grandmother had prescribed for dehydration. Camphor rags soaked in two tin buckets on the floor at either end of the coffin, and at one point her wailing mother hobbled up and freshened the rags in full view of us all. I had seen this same mother beat Ida and her brother with an old corset stay. I remember pulling my legs up into my seat and nudging my head up underneath my grandmother’s arm like a cat. She smelled of Mavis powder and mothballs. My mother was on the other side of me with one hand gripping my thigh. She smelled of her lavender bath. I asked my grandmother if I could go home with her. She nodded that I could. My mother whispered, “Can I go, too?” She nodded again.
    That night I fell asleep in my grandmother’s feather bed to dream not at all. The next morning I found a valerian root underneath my pillow and was brought clover tea to drink. I convalesced at her house for four days, wearing her ancient nightgown and her ancient pantaloons, watching my mother read, looking up at my grandmother every now and then, asking without asking how she could ever return to her sad house, asking if there might be some measure of virtue in retreat. I wonder whether my grandmother had been asking herself that since she left Pasquotank County and Camelia’s memory and all the Roosevelt letters she buried by her