Or maybe…she was that way for a reason. Because she had to be.
Just like Patricia as a child.
Patricia shakes that troubling thought off as Brooklyn leads her to the couch and turns on her tablet, showing some bendy vampire cartoon girl dancing about with a ghost in a tutu.
“Like this!” Brooklyn clumsily imitates the dance the girls are doing on the screen. “Come on, Nana! You can do it!”
Patricia wants to explain what’s just happened to her—the wound, the trip to urgent care, the pain, the stitches. She wants to explain that Nana is hurt and had to take medicine, but…
Well, it doesn’t hurt so much, now. That’s the beauty of “the good stuff,” as the young man at the urgent care called it. Patricia didn’t take the damn Percocet before because she felt as if she were holding up the world, as if her awareness and anxiety might be the glue that held together her rapidly fracturing life. If she allowed herself the merest slip, the merest weakening, she might lose her grip.
But now she realizes that she’s been like a fist held so long that it was frozen, ossified, held so tight that she’d forgotten how much it hurt. Yes, her leg is in less pain now. But everything else hurts less, too. Including her head and her heart. Kind of magical, really.
“Dance, Nana! You can do it!”
And Brooklyn is dancing her heart out, swaying back and forth in mismatched socks and plastic sandals.
“Oh, why not?”
Patricia follows Brooklyn’s lead, although her steps are a lot smaller and more tentative. It only hurts a little, and the doctors didn’t tell her to go to bed, after all—moderate movement, they said, although she didn’t bring home her paperwork. It’s not real ballet, and she doesn’t feel sober at all, but Patricia realizes that…she’s happy. That she is making a memory, caught in a golden moment, dancing with her granddaughter, their arms up and swaying like branches in a tree.
Did she ever have a moment like this with Chelsea? Ever?
Or did she push her daughter away, constantly on the lookout for…what?
Peace? Quiet?
As she sways to the music, she gently probes her own mind, an unusual process she’s studiously avoided her entire life.
What was she trying to get to, all those years ago, what was on the other side of those awkward moments with her own child? It’s almost as if she didn’t want to get close to Chelsea…or to anyone.
Looking back, she was like a porcupine, covered in spines to keep everyone at a distance. And on the other side of those spines, she hid a soft underbelly, a soft everything. She was protecting herself. Trying to keep from getting hurt.
That’s why Patty was such a bitch.
Because then no one could hurt her.
She was sharp, she was snappy, she was as slick and hard as Teflon.
Ever since her mama kicked her out.
She sees it now—a long chain of damaged women.
Mama used to talk about how Big Mama treated her, tried to beat the fear of God into her with the belt buckle. Mama hated Big Mama, swore she’d never beat her daughter as badly but did enough damage with her words and switches. And then Mama kicked Patricia out, and Patricia hated her own mother. And then Patricia told herself she did the best she could as a mother, but it’s fairly safe to say now that Chelsea hates her.
And Ella? Who knows who she hates? She’s gone, run away at seventeen.
Even earlier than Patty and Chelsea left.
And then there’s Brooklyn.
This sweet, pure little soul who still has a smile. Abandoned by her mother and sister, father long gone and probably as cruel as Patricia always assumed him to be. This child left alone with a grandmother she barely knows and infected with a horrible disease, trapped inside a house with someone who doesn’t have the time of day for her, and still, here she is, dancing.
“You are a very special little girl, you know,” Patricia says.
Brooklyn doesn’t stop dancing. “I know!”
It’s stunning—as in, it actually stuns her—to see a woman openly speak that way about herself, even a young one. In Patricia’s experience, few women can honestly say they’re special, and the ones that do claim it know they’ll be universally hated for it. A woman is supposed to blush or look away, deflect the compliment or pay it back, not just own it.
She blinks, tears in her eyes, as she realizes that out of all of them, Brooklyn might make it to adulthood in one piece, not weighed down by the bullshit trauma they’ve been passing along hand-to-hand like a coveted recipe that always omits some important ingredient out of spite.
The song ends, and Brooklyn throws herself back on the couch as if she’s just run a marathon.
“That was fun!”
“It was,” Patricia agrees, meaning it. As soon as she stops dancing, she, too, is overcome by exhaustion. Despite the glories of narcotics, she can feel her wound pulsing against the new stitches. Perhaps it’s time to stop dancing, after all.
“Will you paint my toenails?” Brooklyn asks her.
“Only if you paint mine,” Patricia says without really thinking but pleased to have said it nonetheless.
In her bathroom, she directs Brooklyn to pull out her nail caddy. It’s rather sparse, as she has a standing weekly appointment at the salon and this is just for emergencies and touch-ups. There are various shades of nude, petal pink, and a bright fuchsia she bought for their last trip to Hawaii, and of course that’s what Brooklyn picks. With a dreamy sort of gentleness, she teaches Brooklyn the steps of a proper pedicure, although they’re not going to soak their feet. Brooklyn listens and asks questions and giggles as Patricia paints her tiny little toenails and reminds her she has to hold still until they’re dry. But when it’s time to do Patricia’s feet, she finds that she can’t get them into position without causing herself immense pain.
“Nana, what happened?” Brooklyn asks, gesturing to the bandages that she’s only just noticed.
“I got hurt,” Patricia tells her. “But I’ll be okay. Maybe you can paint my fingernails instead.”
Brooklyn takes her hand and turns it this way and that. Patricia can only see the way her veins rebelliously wiggle over her bones these days, just another flaw that can’t be fixed with the money she no longer has. “But your nails are so fancy already.”
Patricia smiles and wiggles her fingers. She’s wrong, of course; the French manicure is overgrown and badly chipped.