The Apron My Mother-in-Law Handed Me
I was not at the luncheon. I have had it since from Aunt Phyllis herself, and from two other women who were at those tables, and they agree on every part of it but the dessert.
Phyllis is Marge’s older sister. She is sixty eight and she spent thirty one years as a nurse at the hospital in Yankton, the last twelve of them on the floor where the mothers and babies are. She had come up to see me the second day and had asked to see the incision, and I had shown her, and she had nodded and said, “Nineteen. He does nice work. Those’ll come out in a few days and you’ll think you’re mended. You won’t be. Six weeks. Don’t let anybody hurry you.”
The club came at noon, eight women counting Marge. By then she had gotten both tables up and the cloths on, not ironed, and the ham was in late. There was no seven layer salad. There were pickles in the jar they came in. Marge’s set hair had come down on one side from the basement stairs.
It was Phyllis who noticed the bassinet was not in the front room, where it had been every afternoon that week.
She waited until they were seated and the first hand was dealt. Then she put her cards face down on the cloth.
“Marge,” she said. “Where’s the girl who had surgery nine days ago?”
Marge was pouring coffee.
“Home to her daddy,” she said. “He came and got her this morning like she was twelve years old. I asked her to help me get ready for club and she walked out the front door.”
“Help you how?”
“Just the little things. The tables. The roaster. I wrote it all down for her.”
Phyllis held out her hand. She did not say a word. She just held it out, palm up, the way she must have held it out for a thousand charts.
Marge got the envelope off the kitchen counter and gave it to her.
Phyllis put on her reading glasses and read it through. Then she read it aloud. All of it, in order, in the flat voice of a nurse reading back a doctor’s orders to be sure she has them right. Card tables up from the basement, two. Folding chairs, eight. Roaster up.
When she finished, nobody picked up a card.
“Marjorie,” Phyllis said. “That girl was cut open nine days ago. Through the skin and the muscle wall and the womb. The staples came out four days ago. She has strips of paper tape holding her shut, and she is not to lift anything heavier than that child. You wanted her carrying a roaster up your basement stairs.”
“She could have made two trips,” Marge said. But she said it smaller.
“She could have torn herself open on your steps and bled into her own belly,” Phyllis said, “and you’d have been at the beauty shop.”
Lois, who is eighty and does not say much, said, “My Carol couldn’t stand up straight for three weeks after hers.”
“I got up,” Marge said. Her voice had changed. “Four days. I got up after four days and nobody read me any list of what I couldn’t lift.”
Phyllis took her glasses off.
“I know you did,” she said, and the women tell me she said it gently. “I was there. I thought it was wrong then, and it was not my house, and I didn’t say so. I’m saying so now.”