Swim

using every single day. It can’t be enough that things are functional,” she’d say as she plucked a wilted flower from the bouquet that stood on the table just inside the front door, or brushed a stray lock of hair from my eyes. “They have to be lovely. You have to feel good every time you look at them.”
    My grandma, I knew, was beautiful, even though she denied it. “Oh, you should have seen me at twenty. Then I was a looker!” She’d shown me pictures of herself on the beach in Atlantic City, in an old-fashioned swimsuit, modestly cut, but still displaying her tanned, rounded shoulders and her cleavage. Her lips were dark with lipstick, and she smiled coyly, her brows lifted in a knowing expression and her hair thick and brown and wavy, the same hair my mother had inherited and passed down to me. Her figure was a perfect hourglass, full hips and bosom with a tiny waist between, and her face was heart shaped, with generous features, wide-set eyes and full lips that looked pursed for a kiss. She loved clothes and dressed beautifully, in the cuts and fabrics she’d learned would complement her petite but curvy figure—A-line skirts and fitted jackets, narrow belts and blouses she’d have tailored to accommodate her chest.
    “Here we are on our honeymoon,” she would say, resting her fingertip on her younger self’s belly. “And in there . . .”
    “My mom!”
    “Your mom,” she would say, and pull me against her, resting my scarred cheek and drooping eye against the scented warmth of her clothes.
    After the accident, Grandma had stayed home with me for a year, and then, when I was four, she’d enrolled me in nursery school at the JCC, gone back to work part-time at Mills Furniture, which she’d sold before moving to Florida (my father’s father had died when he was a child, and his mother, suffering a slow decline from Alzheimer’s, was in a nursing home in Maine, and in no position to help). That summer, the summer of my surgeries, she’d go home after work to pick up the food she’d prepared the night before, and then come to the hospital to feed me. “Let’s get organized here,” she would say, snapping a tablecloth over the table, then wheeling it over to my bed, positioning it over my chest. She’d adjust the bed until I was sitting up, fussing with the books and flowers and water pitcher, straightening my slippers, hanging my robe in the closet. She’d unwrap silverware and napkins, setting me a place even if I was drinking dinner through a straw. While I ate, she’d tell me stories about her day.
    “The Sitter came in again,” she’d say, perfectly erect in her chair, with her legs crossed at the ankles, the tip of her right pump resting on the tiled floor and her gold bracelets twinkling on her arm. Grandma always dressed beautifully. She would wear tweed suits in cool pinks and beiges, with sheer stockings and high-heeled T-strapped shoes and, always, a vintage Hermès scarf elaborately wrapped around her neck, because, as she’d confided, “the neck is always the first to go.” ( Go where? I wondered, but I was twelve before I asked.)
    “What did you do?” I would ask. The Sitter was a man—Nana and her coworkers had never been able to determine whether he was homeless or just odd—who would come into the store and then proceed from one chair to another, until he’d sat in every single chair in the entire place. Armchairs, easy chairs, Parsons chairs, and La-Z-Boy recliners—the Sitter would position himself just so, then sigh, and close his eyes, and rock back and forth, “like a man,” Nana said, “who’s having a hard time in the bathroom.”
    “Bite first,” said Grandma. I lifted my straw to my lips and took a slurp of chicken-corn chowder, letting it slip down my throat.
    Grandma pressed her lipsticked lips together. “I offered him coffee.” “Really?” To my knowledge, the Sitter never spoke, never acknowledged the presence of other people in the store . . . he just moved from chair to chair, grunting his grunts, wiggling his hips deeper into the cushions, until it was closing time and one of the salesmen would take him by the shoulder and gently steer him out the door.
    “Really. I could see him thinking about it.” Grandma sank back into her own chair, letting her chin drift toward her chest, pooching out her lips and frowning, and, in that instant, she became the Sitter, a man I’d never seen but could easily imagine. It was a kind of