Life Without You

They more than simply panties. They were a symbol of freedom. A symbol of hope.

And therefore, just as my sister had so wisely declared—necessary.

Those last days flew by as I finished packing, still trying to kick myself into the proper headspace for this whole adventure.

That was how I was trying oh-so-determinedly to think of it.

An adventure. A search to find a new me…or even to reconnect with the self I had let myself lose. Once upon a time, people had told me I sparkled, and I wanted more than anything to be that girl—or rather, that woman—again. I wanted to be inspiring to people, to leave them basking in the afterimage brightness of my glow. I wanted to approach life with abandon and optimism, rather than fear.

As I strapped myself into my seat on my US Airways flight, a small smile crept across my lips. I may have been dressed in a pair of plain-Jane jeans that needed replacing and a well-cut but unremarkable white button-down, but underneath it all, there was a pair of panties with enough shine to guide a plane back to the runway.

Remember who you are, Dellie, I thought, settling in as the flight attendant instructed us on the finer points of surviving a crash landing. Remember who you are and let people see you sparkle.

Chapter Six (#ulink_1ca53b8a-42f3-5130-81a8-bc3b4bc3d1a3)

There had always been a can of White Rain hairspray in the cabinet, the kind with the shiny green cap and green writing on its silver surface. I remembered the smell of Noxzema, the mentholated white cream in the blue plastic jar, before they went all designer and started making everything from lotions to blackhead-zapping treatments and exfoliating scrubs. Back then, you had one choice: the no-nonsense blue jar with a screw-on lid. No pumps, no frills. Just that unmistakable blue jar. I would look for that jar on every visit, making sure that it was still there in the center cabinet of her tri-paneled medicine cabinet. Some part of me was always looking for reassurance that nothing had changed within the safe little realm of my grandparents’ home. That while we were getting older and everything else was different, there were certain things that were still sacred. So there, in Grammie’s mirrored medicine cabinet, was a thick balm of reassurance. It gave me endless pleasure to unscrew the lid and breathe in its familiar scent, a scent I smelled nowhere else but at my grandmother’s house, the scent of maturity and skin that was being pampered by a deeper clean than my own little face was used to getting. The smell of being a Big Girl, all grown up.

Depending on the time of day, there might be a set of partials soaking in a glass by the sink, the bright pink of artificial gums looking almost lurid as they waited for their next wearing. Multiple tubes of lipstick were always scattered in various locations—some on the faux marble counter to the left-hand side of the sink; some in the little medicine cabinet, on the shelves next to the Gold Bond powder. Again, those were the simpler days, before they branched out and explored all kinds of different formulations of their stock product. Gold Bond was Gold Bond, and it came in a harvest gold plastic canister with a red sifter top.

But back to the lipsticks. They were all invariably Revlon or Cover Girl or Avon, but all of them bore close resemblance to one another in shade—a mauvy rose shade that seemed to get pinker and pinker as time wore on and she got older. Grammie wore Cover Girl blush and pressed powder—another one of those smells that, for some reason, made a heady, heavy imprint on my brain. Lever 2000 or Tone were her soaps of choice, resting in the soap dish tile above the sink, settling with authority into a little suction-cupped soap-saver mat. Sometimes she had Pert Plus shampoo on the ledge of the fiberglass tub-and-shower combo, sometimes it was Pantene. And more often than not, there were foil packets of Alberto VO5 Hot Oil Treatment somewhere in that medicine cabinet, buried amidst all the other clutter along the white plastic shelves of its interior.

These were some of the sights and smells of Grammie’s bathroom, that special lair of lady-dom where us girls prepared every morning for the day and every evening for bed. This was the one with a high, handicapped toilet rather than the standard bowl, where you could peek out the shoulder-height window to see who was on the deck, who might be ringing the bell at the back door or was thomping away after letting the old screen door slam shut behind them. These were the sights and smells that were decidedly absent for me, as I stood staring and studying from the doorway. They made me feel her loss even more acutely, those personal little things that were no longer there.

Would the shock have been less if they’d still been there, unused and collecting the dust of time and neglect? I shook my head and tried to blink back the tears that I felt burning my eyes, my nose, my throat. She wasn’t coming back. I would never get to bury my head in the warm pillowy softness of her frame. She had always disparagingly called herself fat—but she wasn’t fat. She was Grammie, and grammies were supposed to be warm and powdery and soft. She was fluffy. She represented the safety of innocence and youth and fun summers of being carefree.

I looked around at the hollowness of the bathroom.

What was this place going to be like, now that she was no longer here?

I sighed, and it seemed to echo in the small room. I would have almost a month to find out.

Today was day one of my trip.

Today was day one of the Break from Routine listing on my bucket list.

Today was the beginning of my goal to Reconnect With Family, people like my grandfather, as well as the cousins and uncles and aunts who were part of the thread of my extended family—people I’d lost touch with somewhere along the way as my world shrank to be smaller and smaller.

Today was Day One, and I had a lot of work to do.

“Hey, Dellie,” Grandpa said half an hour later, looking up from the paper. He was ensconced in his recliner in the den, his pale bare feet propped up on the footrest, the lamp next to him casting a dim glow of light in the brown-ness of the den.

It was, undeniably, a very brown room. Brown plush carpeting, brown paneling on the walls, brown furniture. Brown, brown, brown. But it had always been that way, in various shades of the same hue, different forms and fabrics coming and going through the years, but always brown. It was a fact that was immutable, and one that comforted me beyond words.

“Hi,” I said, smiling at the familiar sight of him there, in that chair, paper in hand. “What are you watching?”

“The news for now. It should be over in a few minutes, though. Was there something you wanted to watch?” he asked, peering at me from behind the lenses of his glasses.

I shook my head silently, casting a quick glance at the television screen as I shuffled toward the blue recliner that bore pride of place in the room, on the other side of the coffee table from his own chair. It was Grammie’s chair. The more comfy chair, the one that all of us grandchildren made a beeline for. The one that held her scent and bore her imprint.

“This is WAVY TV 10,” said a voice as the newscasters reappeared on the screen.

“No. Nothing I want to watch. Just came to see what you were doing and if you wanted some company,” I murmured.

“I always want your company,” he boomed back at me with a smile. “You’s my gal.”

It was a familiar phrase from him, a simple string of words that I couldn’t hear enough. And now, they seemed to mean even more.

“Good.” My smile back wavered as I noticed how the walls almost echoed with absence.

“So, big things going on in the world?” I asked. Not that I really cared all that much what the news anchors were droning on about, but it seemed an appropriate thing to say at the moment.

“Government’s still the government,” he grumbled good-naturedly. “The race was good, though. My driver won.” His grin widened.

“Yay.”

“Too bad I’m not a betting man; I might have made some money,” he said.

I arched an eyebrow and smiled. “Right, but betting would’ve sucked all the fun out of it for you. I’m glad you’re not the betting type.”

“Why’s that?” he asked.

I shrugged. Something about the idea of my grandfather placing a bet, even if it was just among some of his friends, seemed vaguely unsettling. It seemed dishonest, somehow, and out of character for him. I would’ve had to readjust who I knew him to be. Hardworking, salt-of-the-earth, outspoken.

“Well, no worries. Betting’s for idiots,” he said simply.

“And you’re no idiot,” I returned, keeping my face as sober as possible, even though I felt a smile creeping its way in. Some things never changed, and those were things that were reassuring beyond expression.

“Nope. I’ll tell you who is, though,” he said, the wrinkles of his wizened face shifting as his expression became one of wide-eyed incredulity. “Walt. Old fart,” he panned, not even waiting for me to guess.

I felt my eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “Walt bet on the race?” I squeaked.

“Not on this race, maybe,” Grandpa said, shaking his head as he spoke. “He and Harry have started betting on them, though; and last week those two fools lost their shirts in a bet they had going with two of the boys down at the church.”

“Say what?” I knew I sounded stupefied, but truth be told, I was. There was really no other word for it.

Especially knowing Walt. And Harry. The two brothers had been in my grandparents’ circle of friends for more than fifty years, so I had no memories of a summer passing without them in it. In fact, for as long as I could remember, I’d always called them Uncle Walt and Uncle Harry. I’d gone through much of my childhood thinking they must have been blood relatives.

Silly, perhaps, since the two men were light-skinned African-Americans, but with a family tree as odd as mine, you never knew exactly where one branch might lead. And Lord, if there weren’t things buried deep in family histories that no one ever talked about. They just were. And, as inconceivable as they might have actually been, some things were just glossed over.

Like mom’s cousin Jean, who was three months “premature.” ’Cause goodness knows, her mama walked down that aisle a virgin, pure as the driven snow. It didn’t matter that Jean weighed a healthy eight pounds when she was born. Nope. That cute little butterball of blondness was born three months early.

Also a subject never raised at the dinner table was the fact that Great Uncle Billy was looking mighty chipper in the months before he died. No one ever talked about that one, no ma’am. His buxom twenty-five-year-old home healthcare worker wasn’t responsible for that in any way. It didn’t matter that no one had ever heard of the company she worked for, and that Uncle Billy’s buddies had knocked on his door one day with her in tow—looking mighty professional in thigh-high hooker boots and a skintight nurse’s uniform. The minute the bubble she’d just blown into her bright pink Bubble Yum bubblegum popped and Billy could see the face that went along with the bosoms, she was hired. She was his angel from heaven, bless her heart. She ministered to him in his last days and eased his passing.

Uh-huh.

And now, she was mourning his loss just like the rest of us. Only she was doing it from somewhere on a beach in St. Thomas.

But I digress.