wednesdays

a short story

I'm told she was ubiquitous during my childhood, but I don't remember. Despite earnest attempts to recall, those early years remain jumbled: mom and dad at work, me upstairs sniffing a knitted blanket as she chopped onions—me devouring shards of watermelon on the stoop of the dentist's office, her holding my hand as we crossed the street in the August sun—the two of us barreling down the basement stairs clutching Burger King bags, preparing to feast at a table surrounded by a hoard of perennially displayed Santa Clauses—me, having clogged the toilet at Sunday dinner, she, with her bare hands, breaking apart the too-big-turd, laughing as she scrubbed her forearms, her pendulous turkey wattle reverberating with sincerity, the steam from the faucet, her eyes full of mischief.

When I was in middle school, a ritual had formed. On Wednesdays, my brother and I would load into her grey Oldsmobile, and we'd spend the afternoon together. The three of us would lounge on her living room couches, filling our faces with snacks and flicking through the channels. We'd spend hours watching a Steve Irwin-type wrangle wild snakes and wrap duct tape around lumpy crocodilian snouts. We loved watching the snakes get caught; how they'd squirm and strike but seldom escape the metal hook that inevitably plunged from the sky, pressing their little skulls against the earth. Some snakes acquiesced, becoming flaccid in their feigned death. Most responded with incredulous combativeness; their bodies cascading in sloppy spirals, desperately thrashing like men strangled from behind.

One of these days, during a brief inter-commercial silence, I became aware of a quiet, yet urgent, frictional sound. The sound of a fire plough or a restless leg in nylon pants. My brother was silent and apparently unperturbed, his eyes glued to the screen. I turned to her. She lay supine on the couch, gravely transfixed by the white ceiling. I traced her gaze but found nothing. Cast in the intermittent glow of her dying television, her skin appeared sallow and time furrowed. She seemed utterly lost, forced into a weird vulnerability. She lay perfectly still except for her left hand, in which she was feverishly rubbing a pale blue strip of fabric. Her index and middle fingers pressed together lengthwise, forming a flat surface; her thumb acted like a herbivore's jaw, absently grinding the cloth into a dry bolus of frayed fibers. I could see little threads escaping the periphery of her fingers' blur, and the thin strip flopped like a soggy spaghetto.

I watched her for what felt like a long time but couldn't have been more than a minute, the intensity of her hand never faltered, and she did not blink. I thought I saw her lip quiver once, but I'm not sure. As the show's theme music returned, her eyes whipped towards the screen. For a few seconds, she looked around, blinking, reaffirming her surroundings. I attempted to inconspicuously return my gaze to the screen, but I knew she'd caught me staring. After emitting a few overly theatrical arthritic groans, she sat upright and flashed her Cheshire grin at me. She tossed the frayed fabric silently on the glass coffee table before ravenously draining a large glass of water. She closed her eyes tight as her throat silently writhed with liquid. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, placed the glass on a coaster, and stood smoothing out the wrinkles in her pants. She shuffled over and sat beside me. I felt the cushion cave in with her weight as she gently rubbed my back; I could feel her bracelets catching the fabric of my shirt. 

"What should we do for dinner, hon?" she asked. Before I could answer, my brother suddenly became animated—"Buffalo wings!" he shouted, holding his knees tight against his chest, rocking back and forth with zeal--"BUFF-a-LO WINGSSSSSSSS!" I smiled. She turned her head towards him, cackling with her mouth wide open. She decidedly slapped both palms against her thighs with a ringing thwap: "Buffalo wings!" she exclaimed.

I don't remember when, but, as with many childhood rituals, the Wednesday tradition was retired. I graduated high school and moved away from home to start college, but my thoughts often returned to that day in her living room. I'd plop into my creaky dorm room bed, three hundred miles from home, heavy with sleep, and suddenly hear the violent rustling of that little blue fabric and feel dizzy as I recalled its vertiginous flopping. Even now, in the throes of adulthood, as I drive through a car wash with those lazy noodle-like strips swatting my windshield or notice hot sauce under my fingernails after Happy Hour wings, I become the boy on the couch, hopelessly buried in blizzarding white noise. I chalk it up to nostalgia and garden-variety homesickness; it's just me pining for the good ol' days when there was a couch in her living room rather than a hospital bed. But, the older I get, and the more I return to that day, the more I sense an ordinary profundity beneath its mundane veneer.