Swim

We’re all going to die, but some people—most people—don’t want to think about that. They want to think they’ll live forever, but nobody does. Grandma did not believe, as she said, in sugarcoating things for me. Life was hard. I’d learned that much already.
    “We’ll leave you alone, then,” the woman said, and steered Katie back through the curtains, where I could hear the new-bike-owning Jared entertaining the crowd with details of how he’d been stricken. “I started feeling sick in fifth period, and I thought I could make it to the bathroom, but then . . .” He made an extremely realistic retching noise. “All over the hallway! Right in front of Mr. Palley’s room!”
    Everyone laughed. I closed my eyes, falling into a doze, waking to the click-click of Grandma’s heels in the hallway, at six o’clock sharp. It was dinnertime. Every night, a nurse would place my meal on my table, removing the tan plastic cover to reveal whatever the cafeteria had deemed appropriate fare for patients on a soft diet: grayish-brown meatloaf, gummy mashed potatoes, overcooked canned carrots and peas, all of it whirled in a blender and reduced to a paste . . . and, every night, Grandma would replace the lid, take the tray, and carry it back out into the hall. Her reasoning was that I was suffering enough that I deserved to have only my favorite things for dinner, and so that’s what she would bring me: macaroni and cheese, mashed by hand, matzoh-ball soup with the carrots and celery carefully strained out, corn on the cob cut off the cob, topped with a pat of salted butter and chopped up fine. When I could manage real food again, she’d bake cookies and rugelach for the whole floor, preparing tins of baked goods whenever one of the doctors or nurses had a birthday. She’d bring eclairs and glistening sugar-glazed fruit tarts from her favorite bakery on Newbury Street, and I’d tear them into tiny bites with my fingers, letting each bit of pastry or chocolate or cream dissolve slowly on my tongue, filling my mouth with the tastes: rich, salty, bitter, meltingly sweet.
    Dinner would be served each night on the china she’d brought from home. She would bring fresh flowers every few days and use real linens, napkins and tablecloths in bright patterns that she’d spread over the table that wheeled next to the bed and swung out over my chest. She would sit in the green plastic-cushioned armchair next to the bed and pick at her own dinner, keeping up a cheerful conversation about what she’d done that day. When she was younger, after my mother was in school, she had worked as a saleswoman at Mills Fine Furniture, the store her husband had founded in downtown Boston. When he’d died, she’d become the owner, but, after a year behind a desk in the back office, she’d decided that she preferred being out on the floor, helping customers decide on the perfect lamp or chair or a just-right dining-room table. She’d hired a manager to handle the payroll and the paperwork, the hiring and the firing, the vendors and the taxes and the rent, and had gone back to work as a saleswoman until she’d retired and moved down to Florida. There she had stayed, in the same gated community as some of the people she’d known back east, playing bridge and mah-jongg and canasta, going on power walks and attending water aerobics classes, until she came back to Massachusetts to take care of me.
    Grandma told me how when she’d been, as she put it, “a working girl,” she would unlock the store’s front doors each morning at ten o’clock, with her hair, in its modified beehive, perfectly arranged, her lipstick freshly applied and her nails manicured and polished pale pink. She would position herself at just the right distance, never hovering or crowding but never too far away, smiling at whoever came through the door: young couples, single women, sometimes entire families, with babies bundled into snowsuits and great-grandparents with walkers and canes. How can I help you? she would ask, always managing to sound as if helping them would be the highlight of her day, even if it was 7:55 and the store closed at 8:00 and she’d been on her feet all day long. What do you love? she would ask, instead of What do you need?
    “Furniture’s something people have to live with,” she explained to me that summer in the hospital. “A kitchen table, a dining-room chair, the couch in their living room, those are things they’re seeing and