Cousin Cousine

September 10, 2014

Cousin Cousine 

This was some time ago: Uncle Albert was telling me about a cousin of his. “I don’t know if she’s a real cousin,” he was saying, raising his voice an octave and taking on a Southern drawl, “but she was more like a sister anyway, when we were growing up.”

This cousin lived not far from me, he was saying. And, he was right about that, no more than an hour’s drive; so last Sunday afternoon, when Roz had to work, I went to see her. The nursing home was tucked behind a strip-shopping mall with a pizza place, a gym, an auto parts place, and the local ABC store and only a few weeds in the parking lot.  None of the stores were open: you shouldn’t be eating, drinking, working up a sweat, or on your car on Sunday (when, it seems to me, you could be doing all four).

   I could see the woman through the door, both propped up and leaning over in her wheel chair. She had on a bright cadet-blue sweater, a long tan skirt that buttoned up the front, thick stockings and heavy shoes. The top of her head, all I could see of her head, was the color of day-old snow.

     I knocked, walked in. There was another woman with her sitting solidly on the single bed, high-waisted jeans and a t-shirt with Love is a Gift on the front, all her features sewn tightly into the middle of her wide face. “Who are you?” she asked.

     Since it seemed, suddenly, too difficult to explain, I tried a trick Tom Nashe taught me – from his journalism days, he said. I said:

     “I’m Ted,” as if, of course I am. “Who are you?”

     “Becca.”

     “ . . . . ”

     “Her daughter!” Your turn!

Here, I thought, is where Jim Blaine would start a shaggy dog story, but I couldn’t find a place to begin; so I ask her if she’s heard her mother, whose head hasn’t moved – it’s still falling into her lap – heard her mother talk of a Cousin Albert.

     “No!” She hasn’t.

     “I see,” I say, backing out the door. “Well, maybe I can visit another time,” thinking “after the Rapture.” I’ll be here anyway.

Breaking every rule of good sense, when I get home I call Uncle A.

     “I went to see your cousin Etty today.”

     “Who?”

     “Etty.”

     “Never heard of an Etty.”

     “The one that was ‘like a sister,’ you said.”

     “Never had a sister – you know that.”

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