Excerpt
Posted by n
From Chapter 1: Clean to Dirty
I was naked, sitting on a white enamel stool with a black rubber grooved seat in the middle of my grandmother’s bathtub. Grammy turned on the tap; when the water steamed, she filled an empty, quart-sized Columbo Yogurt container. I was wondering what she was going to do with it when she dumped it over my head.
“Wah!” I yelped.
Hot water flowed over me and collected in the crease between my shut legs, making me feel sick to my stomach. I was not used to bathing like this, wet skin in open air; at home, Mumma filled the tub with a few inches of placid warm water before letting me sit inside of it. Shivering now, I began to cry as Grammy soaped a rough white washcloth with Ivory, scoured my skin, and told me to shhh. Then she filled up the yogurt container and doused me again. I cried some more but Grammy persisted. She poured Johnson’s baby shampoo into her hand and scrubbed my head, hard. I could feel her fingers, her trimmed fingernails, press right into my skull. “Lotta hair,” she said under her breath. “Just like me, when I was little.” I looked up at her hair, which was short and gray and waved around her face, but then she pushed my head down and deftly poured several pails of water, one after the other, over my hair to rinse. Bitter suds ran between my eyes and spilled into my mouth. “Please stop Grammy, no more!” I spit.
“Almost done,” she insisted. Normally, she was gentle with me, adoring even, so her treatment now seemed all the more harsh. The worst part was the anticipation, not knowing if another deluge was coming while water continued to filter through my thick long hair. All I could do was wait for it to be over.
And it stopped: as Grammy was washing my feet, she noticed the black birthmark in the middle of the sole of my left foot. She scrubbed it, and when it wouldn’t go away, she brought it closer to her eyes to examine. “Magic Marker,” she said under her breath, rubbing harder.
“No Grammy, it’s a birthmark.” I told her.
“I don’t tink so,” she said, shaking her head. My grandmother had been tricked before by the accoutrements of the 1970s child. Once she had seen my brother and me eating white Tic-Tacs and had screamed, “Ruth’s pills! Why are you taking Ruth’s pills?” not believing they were mints until my aunt had compared her blood pressure medication to a confiscated Tic-Tac in the palm of Grammy’s hand.
My grandmother kept scrubbing at my birthmark; there was no way she would allow dirt to trick her. There was no way she would allow Magic Marker to soil her granddaughter’s sole. But it wouldn’t go away.
She stared at the mark as if she couldn’t believe it. “Huh,” she said, finally giving up. She dried me off and kissed the bottom of my foot. “Birtmark,” she said in her scratchy voice, her wobbly old accent. She laughed. We both understood that I had somehow won.
2 Responses to “Excerpt”
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Agabian Launches New Book at LGBT Center « Armenian Gay & Lesbian Association of NY Says:
November 12th, 2008 at 2:23 am[...] an excerpt from her book click here and to purchase a copy via Amazon click here. Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Book [...]
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Arayik Says:
January 8th, 2009 at 5:44 amExcellent,
you are beauty and talent baby
