“Shit, Burt. I lost my shoe.”

It was the third time she’d called me that, and I was getting tired of it. If she’d lost the ability to remember names, I was prepared to understand; but calling me a man’s name was the last straw. And, this cursing was new. Grandmothers aren’t supposed to curse.

“Your shoes are both there, Gran.”

“No. This one’s gone.” She shook her left foot and its sturdy black lace-up. “It’s gone.”

“It’s right there.”

“Hell, no it’s not. Hell. It’s not there.”

“Will you stop with the cursing?” I resisted the temptation to shake her, knowing the words wouldn’t fall out of her that way. They were stuck there, along with the confusion that gathered in her brain and spilled over into every conversation.

“But I tell you-"

“Look.” I held her arm and bent down to point to her shoe, tapping it, holding up the double-tied laces. “They’re both here. See? Both shoes tied on firmly. You didn’t lose one.”

I searched her face for understanding. Blue eyes swam in their sockets, looking for an anchor in my face, looking for an explanation for this mystery.

“But there’s something…” She couldn’t form the words.

“Wrong?”

“Something on…” One eyebrow writhed with an effort to capture fading language.

“Schuhe. Meine schue. Ich denke…” She tried again and trailed off. I hated this worse than the other loss. Even her retreat into childhood language ended in the same confusion. Words were lost in any tongue.

She was shaking her shoe again. Suddenly I spotted something white on the bottom. Paper: of course it was a sticker. I should have understood. She watched as I pulled it off and held it up for her.

“There. You see? Your shoe’s still there. Just paper stuck to it.”

“Oh.” Her watery eyes studied the scrap with pathetic intensity. “My shoe’s back. It’s fine.”

I wanted to scream. How can a life continue this way – with this living loss, this isolation in the middle of companionship, the mind groveling before the body’s fall? Mein Gott, what are we going to do?

Her hand pressed softly into mine. “Thank you, Burt.”

© Megan Sherrin, 2009

Matches

"Hi, " I said. "Those look a little dangerous."

She was probably about about four years old and her dark, curved eyes crinkled with puzzlement...and a bit of disgust. She stood nonchalantly behind the courtyard wall, a single Saturday schoolchild spending her morning outside in what yard she had. In her left hand, she held a book of matches, the sandpaper side of which she was using to try to strike one single, drooping match. Beside her was a large cardboard box. I resisted the urge to shake it and see if it was filled or empty.

"You shouldn't be playing with those. You might set something on fire." I groaned inwardly. This sounded like a grownup speaking, and a dull one at that.

"They're not working." She looked scornfully at me. Of course she wanted to set something on fire, but the matches had foiled her plan before I had even come on the scene.

"Well, let's not play with them." It's amazing how quickly we use first person plural with children. Involve ourselves in a request for action or avoidance and we think we gain their acquiescence more quickly.

"Is your mom home?" I asked, searching with the practiced mind of an oldest sibling for any authority to which I could appeal. "Let's tell her you found matches." My eyes swept the courtyard area, the little metal fence, the porch of the small row house. A neat stretch of trashcans and tightly-closed trashbags lined the house wall behind her. The matches had probably been intended for the trash.

"She's not here." The laconic voice could hardly have belonged to a four-year-old.

"Is this your house?"

"Yes. But she's not home. Grandma."

"Let's tell her, then." I tried a hopeful tone. Surely Grandma would be happy for her granddaughter to show her the matches she'd nearly used to burn up the cardboard box and singe off all of her hair.

"She no English. She Chinese." She seemed to have lapsed into the speech of the non-native English speaker. I took a second to marvel at the way children--and often adults, who are, of course, only grown-up children-- often communicate our view of people through slight unconscious emulation of their voice and mannerisms.

Now the girl was staring at me, a glare of suspicion on her face. Was I going to get her in trouble?

"It's ok. Can I tell her?"She nodded, still frowning, probably wondering why I pressed the issue. She had, after all, put down the matches and now stood with her hands at her sides. The dark of her eyes was uncanny.

I knocked on the door and fidgeted uncomfortably on the stoop. The moment before a stranger's door opens always seems like a decade. When facing the possibility of no language commonality, one begins to dread and wonder to a degree completely disproportionate to the errand.  My throat called insistently (in several different, completely unhelpful languages) for water.

A middle-aged woman stood in the threshold, baby on her arm. She looked at me, and past me to the girl standing guiltily behind me, with absolutely no expression whatsoever. Even her eyebrows and the wrinkled corners of her mouth held themselves unnervingly still.

"Um... Ni hao," I began. She looked at me blankly. Maybe she was confused by my Southern-accent.

I tried again. "The little girl has matches." I nodded in the girl's direction. She had the look of a child trying to appear innocent. The woman's expressionless gaze flicked between myself and the girl but showed no emotion.  I frowned and began pantomiming striking a match. My invisible match made a flaring sound and elicited an "oooh" and a raising of the inscrutable eyebrows. "No, no," she said.

"Yes. I didn't want her to burn herself. Maybe she got them from the trash." I indicated the trash bags and then pointed to the matches, which the intelligent child had thrown on the ground. "Do you want me to pick them up?"

At her nod, I retrieved the matches and handed them back to her. She looked at me, perhaps unable to remember an appropriate English remark. I knew how she felt. "Xie xie."

Shuffling out of the gate, I felt a four-year old pair of eyes on the back of my head.  Hopefully soon she would find something to replace the fun I'd spoiled. I turned and waved.

 Grandmother and granddaughter watched me in silence as I headed for the end of the block. Their dark eyes followed me wordlessly.

CityLife:

another poem

The man on the corner with his cardboard sign and bullet hole pants

Sits yards away from the vendor selling water and gum

Two doors down the donut lady pours coffee and hums

From fifty feet away the bullhorn deacon rants

They will be mentioned by gleaming young writers scribbling sweat

Six hundred word columns about skyscrapers and rock art

Immigrant lives and how a waitress got the star part

During this we ride subways and get our feet wet

© Me