Amina Gautier

Amina Gautier teaches creative writing at DePaul University and is the 2010 Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Fiction for her short story collection At-Risk (forthcoming University of Georgia Press). More than sixty of her short stories have been published, appearing in Antioch Review, Callaloo, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review, and Southern Review among other places in addition to appearing in several anthologies, including The Sincerest Form of Flattery: Contemporary Women Writers on Forerunners in Fiction, Best African American Fiction, Voices, The Notre Dame Review: The First Ten Years, and New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2008.  Her work has been honored with scholarships and fellowships from Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, Ucross Residency, and Sewanee Writer’s Conference and has been awarded the William Richey Prize, the Jack Dyer Award,  the Schlafly Microfiction Award, the Danahy Fiction Prize, and a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Home Care  

Thirty minutes just to prepare Mrs. McAllister for her weekly shower. Ten to help her out of the bed and out of her housedress, ten more to help her down the hallway to the bathroom, and a final ten to get her situated on her shower seat. Today was the day to bathe her and Winsome could find no way of getting out of it.

When she arrived, she filled a basin with warm soapy water and hoped Mrs. McAllister would forget and settle for a wash-up instead. No sooner had she carried the kidney-shaped basin in and set it on a small tray table beside the old woman’s bed than Mrs. McAllister’s good hand reached out to stop her. “No,” the old woman said, gripping her arm. “I’m having company today. I’ll need a bath.”

Winsome could barely understand her slurred speech. “What’s that?”

Mrs. McAllister spoke slowly, moving the side of her mouth that had not been paralyzed by stroke. “My niece is coming to visit. I want a bath.”

Winsome emptied the beige hospital-issued basin and stood to the side of the bed as Mrs. McAllister slowly worked herself up and out of it. It took some time before she was finally able to hoist herself. Using a system of rocking backwards and pushing herself forwards, she slowly inched herself to the edge of the bed. There she swung her good foot over, while Winsome lifted the dead one and helped her to sit up. Mrs. McAllister used her good arm for leverage, pushing while Winsome pulled. Bracing her good hand against the bed, she gripped the edge of the mattress and pushed herself upward—teetering—while Winsome stood before her with open arms, waiting to catch her if she slipped and fell. As with a toddler taking her first steps, those first moments of standing were perilous. Anything within the reach of Mrs. McAllister’s arm was likely to be pulled down, so Winsome moved the tray table and TV cart out of the way. Once, Mrs. McAllister had stumbled and caught Winsome around the neck, nearly strangling her. The dead hand could do nothing, but the good one was strong enough for two.

“Let’s get you out of this dress,” Winsome said.  “Please lift your arms, ma’am.”

            “I can’t,” she said. “You know that.”

            “Lift the good one.”

            Mrs. McAllister lifted her good arm and Winsome nudged the old woman’s elbow down through the armhole of the sleeve of her striped muumuu. Even in the dead of winter, Mrs. McAllister wore these thin cotton housedresses with their round scooped necks and large patch pockets. Once they had been meant for the fastidious housewife desirous of not ruining her good clothes, but now they were worn mostly by the obese and the infirm. The bottoms of the dresses were shaped like bells, the material billowed from the waist down to camouflage girth. Held closed by front snap closures, the muumuus were simple enough that Mrs. McAllister required very little help dressing and disrobing. With one hand she could fasten all of her snaps. The muumuss were jaunty. Striped or flowered, each collar edged with satin ribbons that could be pulled and tied into a bow at the neck. Winsome preferred to see her that way—in lilac, seafoam, carnation, buttercup and cornflower muumuus, rather than naked in the shower with her half dead body stark and staring. 

“I don’t want any of those,” Mrs. McAllister said. “I need something nice.” She had to repeat herself twice before Winsome understood. She went to the closet where an array of Mrs. McAllister’s heavy dresses waited on wire hangers, their hems hanging over useless shoes, and pulled out the first thing she saw.

“This?” The heavy dress and the matching gloves pinned to it had dulled to a pale yellow, visible even under the clear plastic.

“My old Eastern Star outfit from First AME Zion,” she said. “No. Find something else.” Winsome searched, but all of the clothes were from bygone days—outdated, decaying, and boasting intricate ties, twists, sashes and buttons—clothing Mrs. McAllister would never be able to wear again.

Her lack of suitable clothing had never before been a problem. In the two years that Winsome had been her personal home care health aide, she’d not known Mrs. McAllister to ever go anywhere. Winsome was there four hours a day with her, and Medicare sent a nurse and physical therapist to do required checkups. Despite her hopes for the day, Mrs. McAllister never received visits from family or neighbors; she entertained no guests. Until now, the muumuus had sufficed.

            Winsome settled Mrs. McAllister into her shower chair and adjusted the water. She aimed the hand-held showerhead at the old woman’s limbs and hosed her down. Mrs. McAllister had to be washed in sections. She was a large woman and, except for her dead limb, the rest of her body was strong. There was an unnerving solidity to her at times like this when Winsome showered her, a radiating warmth that rose from the stale bedridden skin that smelled of sheets and sweat and sleep. Mrs. McAllister’s body would keep her alive much longer than she wished. Winsome marveled at its tenacity as she passed the soapy washcloth under and over the sagging breasts. Unlike other clients her age, there was no papery wrinkling of the skin, no flimsiness to the flesh, no sign that the flesh beneath was losing hold of its clutch on life and skin and bone and hair.

“Is this niece the one I met before?”

“That was my sister’s daughter. This is my great-niece. I used to take care of her; she lived with me for a while. She goes to college out in California with the president’s daughter, but she was there first. What’s that girl’s name again?”

“Chelsea?”

“That’s the one,” Mrs. McAllister said. “My niece is real smart. You’ve seen her picture out in the living room.”

Alone in the living room where Mrs. McAllister could no longer go, Winsome had seen the lone picture on the mantel among the dead and dying plants she was not paid to water. Mrs. McAllister had several times had her retrieve albums from the top of her closet and shown her old pictures of her with her parents and siblings, but Winsome did not care for those photographs. Dating back from the late thirties, they were black and white pictures, older than old. Winsome did not care to see Mrs. McAllister’s father in his military uniform or Mrs. McAllister’s mother in a studio shot with a fake fox fur thrown over her shoulder or Mrs. McAllister herself standing in the middle of five other children dressed for church with her ankle socks drooping and squinting into the sun. Those pictures made her seem historical, made it seem as if she were already dead.

Born two years after the stock market crash in ’29 she had already seen more life than Winsome had read of in school. Those pictures made her place Mrs. McAllister in the annals of all the American history her mother had made her study when they’d first arrived from Jamaica and discovered the insignificance of British deeds of valor. Yes, she had seen the picture. She had often been drawn to it. Drawn to the bamboo wicker chair the young girl sat in that Winsome recognized so well from her own picture day at school, the wicker chair that dated the photograph and helped Winsome to place it in the late eighties. She had sat in such a chair for her fourth grade picture, the first school picture she’d ever taken in the United States. She’d been quickly ushered into the seat by the harassed photographer who was eager to get to the other thirty or so children who waited. She’d only been allowed to sit and pose for two minutes, but she’d wanted to remain in the seat that felt so much like a throne and seemed so much like a promise made to her of what her life would be now that they had left Kingston and Jamaica behind.

Yes, she had seen the picture and the young girl who sat dwarfed in that wicker chair, whose long black hair looked as if it had been pressed and curled just for such an event, whose eyes met the camera head-on with a confidence that Winsome’s own frightened stare did not reveal, whose legs did not reach the bottom of the chair, who must even now be three or four inches shorter than herself. Once gone, a girl like that would not return to Brooklyn so easily. Not for a half dead great-aunt. Yes, she had seen the picture. She had been drawn to it and to the girl she did not know but who must surely be near in age to her, who was now off in college in California studying with the president’s daughter while she herself had merely taken a certificate and was forced to share a bedroom with her nosy younger sister. Her own mother would have never let her travel so far away for something like school, which could be had anywhere.

Mrs. McAllister said, “You’re scrubbing too hard.”

“Sorry. There’s a lot of dirt.”

“My niece and I used to play Hangman on my back,” the old woman said. “She would rub lotion over my back and then write in it and I’d have to guess whatever she had spelled.”

Winsome soaped and rinsed Mrs. McAllister’s dead arm. “She always did it in print. I couldn’t guess it if she did it in cursive,” Mrs. McAllister said.

            Winsome poured liquid soap on the rough washcloth and guided it from one side to the other across Mrs. McAllister’s expansive back, making it something other than a dead thing. The filmy soap transformed her skin into a chalkboard. Winsome started at the left and, working her way to the right shoulder blade, she traced a sentence across the old woman’s back, letters of skin appearing through lather. No one is coming.

After some time, Mrs. McAllister said, “I can’t make it out.”

Winsome retraced her letters in the too quickly dissolving lather, but the old woman refused to play.

“Water’s getting cold,” Mrs. McAllister complained.

            Winsome adjusted the water, aimed the showerhead at her handiwork, and washed away the truth from Mrs. McAllister’s back.

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