I don’t know what it was about having had Grandma Alice in the townhouse with us after Mom died hid from me about Buddy or hid from her about me. We’ll never be able to find those three people and ask. All I know is this: after Grandma died, either we both changed (and we must have, right?) or became, all at once, with Grandma suddenly out of the way, more completely visible to each other, as if Grandma Alice and maybe even Mom before her had been veils hung in the air between us, like two tall lace curtains, like the ones in the too-large, boarded-up community room at First Lutheran (boarded-up ever since the pastor’s wife, Mrs. June, had hung herself in it, and I guess I’ll have to tell you about that, too, Little Alice — I still feel bad about that), but after Grandma died, your mother, who’d treated Mom and Grandma and me with courtly deference for years, changed utterly, ferociously expanded her rule in that little townhouse like a long-imprisoned medieval monarch on a tear.
The first thing she did was turn up the heat. Grandma Alice had been, like me, always hot, always opening windows. Mom had gotten along with everybody about temperature, or never thought it really worth bringing up, but Buddy was always cold and let you know. If she sat in the den to watch her shows, she did it with a blanket over her legs; if she went outside in the wintertime, she layered up like a pastry, a big pink-iced raspberry turnover. Me, I’d always thought and still do that there was nothing better than that feeling you get on a January morning when it’s 20 degrees, sunny and clear, and you go outside to shovel the snow in nothing but gym shorts and snow boots. Your skin got all tight and you knew where your body was in space. Maybe the ball player in me likes the cold for that reason: when you’re cold, you know where you are in space; when you’re hot, you can’t tell where the edge of you is melting into air, where you stop and everything begins. Just saying it that way, I can see Buddy smile. She loves that feeling. Buddy wants to melt into everything.
I noticed how warm Buddy had made the house since Grandma Alice died after she moved me upstairs. She didn’t move me up there by fiat, mind you, Little Alice, she didn’t do it by royal decree. I was consulted. Briefly. After the accident – that’s what we both called me breaking my back, “the accident” – your mother and Grandma set me up on the main floor of the townhouse, the level you walked in from the street, the one with the kitchen, living room and den. The den, when I came home from the hospital, became my bedroom, just past the entryway at the front door, turn right; and the TV got moved into the living room where Buddy had always wanted it to be, where neither Grandma Alice nor Mom would ever have allowed it. Grandma Alice had a rule that you don’t have a television in “the sitting room.” Sitting rooms were for “visiting.” They were public land. Buddy, though, in a way that made total sense but would take too long to explain – how am I ever gonna tell you everything you have to know about my sister, Little Alice, about how much she meant to me in the time I’ve got left? It’s not possible. To tell another person whole, to get them all down on paper so anyone could know them whole, takes forever.
Anyway. After Grandma died, Buddy had a lift installed with the money Mom and Grandma Alice had left. It wasn’t cheap, but she thought it was worth it. The way she put it to me was: if I stayed in the den, that main level would be my world and, more than likely, I’d stay in my room all the time. (She came up with this plan when I was still “bed-ridden,” as they say, and wasn’t zipping about in my chair all the time like a mouse in a box making patterns on the floor.) In the long run, she was right. She generally is. Sleeping upstairs made the house feel more like a house again, and having her close by at night so we could talk across the hall wasn’t just a practical comfort in the early days and easier for her, it set us up in a picture of when we’d been little and done the same thing, talked across the hall at night in those years after the house had burned down, and so it bound us together again, prepared us for the years to come, these years which have been, in some ways, the best years of my life.
Here’s how I found out, more than a year after the accident, what Buddy had done while I was in a coma and never told me. It had to do with the other two most important parts of my life: Peggy Miss and the game called baseball.
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