In the beginning is the fish stink, a padlock pinched through a doorlatch eye. When I’m eight years old, my mother lifts the hem of her nightshirt to show me the anvil-shaped burn on her thigh. “I was your age when my mother did this to me,” she says. “Be grateful you have a mother who loves you.”
Every winter Saturday of my childhood, she makes soup. Her knife keeps time on the cutting board, slicing carrots shaped like stubby fingers. The seconds roll off in quarter-inch discs. Some of them stick to the blade. “Thank God I broke the cycle,” she tells me. “Thank God you don’t carry my baggage.”
On the stove, a chicken carcass floats in a large pot of water. Later, I will help her strain out the bones, the spongy liver, the shriveled heart. A cooked pair of lungs. She says they make the stock richer. Better not to waste them.
Sometimes the knife stops, time with it. “Look.” My mother points to a fine line creasing the wrinkled knuckle of her index finger, an inch-long fissure no wider than a pencil stroke. It’s the scar she loves most. “I was five years old when I cut it to the bone on a fishing knife,” she explains. “Daddy taped it shut with electrical tape.” She picks up the knife. “Daddy was the only one who ever loved me.” Daddy died of a heart attack when she was twenty-nine, a year before I was born. That’s why she calls him Daddy and not Grandpa, and only rarely Your Grandpap Who Would Be So Proud.
Every Sunday, we visit the nursing home. We find my grandmother in the corner of the common room by the cockatiels. The cockatiels clutch wire bars and wooden perches with talons the color of raw chicken. They flap their wings and scream, parting craggy beaks to reveal tongues like the blind gray heads of earthworms. The wire cage shimmies on its hook.
Gran startles when we sit down. She’s a withered husk of the woman she was, a ghost who can’t tell her own story. Since the stroke, the only noise to pass her lips is a high, worried Oh! that she repeats, as if constantly surprised.
“Hi, Mother,” my mother says.
“Hi, Gran,” I say.
“Oh!” my grandmother says.
My mother tears open the Mounds bar we bought at the gas station and slides it across the table. “We brought you some candy.”
“Oh!” Gran reaches for my hands instead. Her skin feels papery, but her grip is impossibly strong, as if to say, This is how much I wish I could talk to you.
I squeeze back, despite knowing I should hate her for what she’s done to my mother, and by extension, for what she’s done to me. It’s hard to believe she’s the same woman responsible for the keloid scar on my mother’s thigh.
“She thinks you’re me,” my mother says.
I nod, understanding why she wants this to be true.