Heather Troyer

     The first package arrived at ten o'clock yet that night.  It had a blue rectangular appearance underneath its brown wrapping, and the girl placed it on the carpeted floor where two white plaster walls met in a corner, where it fit nicely.   Ten more boxes were delivered the next day, which she lined up against the wall farthest from her bed, and the UPS truck did not stop its daily appearance for the next three weeks.  Small square boxes came, larger and longer ones, and everything in between.  One octagonal shape even crossed ger path, though she did not pause to consider it for more than two seconds.  Cream-colored tissue paper covered some, gaudy wrapping paper others, some were simply made of printed and dyed cardboard.  An especially delicate-appearing delivery found its way into her hands on the last day, and she almost crushed its nearly paper-thin structure as she tore off the packaging.  She set it atop the line-up of boxes on the left side of her bedroom where its curled pink ribbon caught the gust of a late afternoon breeze sneaking its way through an opened crack of window before the girl pulled the wooden frame firmly down over the offending breath of air and turned the latch with a grimace.
     She carried the trash barrel full of crumpled brown paper and strings of tape out to the dumpster herself on the day before her recital.  The cleaning lady gave a wandering eyeball to the girl thumping by with her load as she sprayed a viciously lemon-scented dusting aid across a mahogany table and the bowl of fresh fruit topping it in the front hallway.  He father found the barrel on its side where she left it before running upstairs to go through her calming exercises and then focus on the baroque selection she planned to perform the following evening.  The girl and her mother and father spent a quiet night at home watching a classic in black and white that was a favorite of the mother's on the downstairs television.  The pathos of the tortured miscommunication between the male and female leads cast a heavy mood into the darkened room where the three sat nibbling popcorn.  The mother sniffed once when the camera rested on a particularly fuzzy shot of the main young woman of interest in the film lying atrophied across a gilt-edged couch in a silken white robe as she sobbed out the motivations behind her cold behavior throughout the past year of their lives to the newly befriended young gentleman.  The father gave a series of one long and two short sniffs at regular intervals.  The girl kept up a solemn mood throughout the viewing except for one brief second after her mother mentioned her grandmother would be bringing a plate of her lace cookies to the recital the next evening, when a pleased smile could be seen to tug at the corners of her mouth in the flickering aura projected by the television screen.
     The following morning, the girl awoke at seven o'clock and played slowly through several pieces on her oboe before dining on a conglomoration of vitamins with a light brunch. She napped in the early afternoon and then put on a simple black dress and drove to the recital hall with her instrument.  Her early evening performance went smoothly.  She put all of the concentration she could muster into each selection on her program, sustained by the great white light beating down on her from above that warmed a patch of hair on the back of her ginger-colored head to a special degree, though she didn't notice this until she ran her hand over her head from roots to straight shoulder-length tips after she walked off the stage with her pianist for the final time.  Yes, during her performance she was quite oblivious to unnecessary details of the situation, and hardly even noticed the roomful of people gathered among the shadows several feet below her with upturned faces.  When she bowed to them she felt as though they might be only figments of her imagination left over from some fancy she had been through much earlier
that day.  For this reason, it was rather jolting to learn that the friends and relatives and several others who filed up to her at the reception had actually been at the same performance as she, and had heard almost everything, except for most details.  It rather irked her, in fact, to realize they had been watching her during what she had convinced herself to experience as a somewhat private moment with the music so that it might project a nice feel to what she did.  She was glad to see her grandmother, however, experiencing a flow of nostalgia thinking of her own childhood and of the long life the slender white-haired woman had led mingled with a sadly compassionate quickening and the sinking of her heart as she was struck by the frailty of the worn body giving hers a proud squeeze.  The girl gave in to the weariness that seeped throughout her as the crowd dispersed and the long hours she had been keeping recently combined with a release of tension convinced her to climb into bed as soon as possible after arriving home.
     The next afternoon the girl opened all of the boxes lining her room.  Each one contained wishes of good luck and encouragement for her recital from friends far and near and slips of paper redeemable for bouquets of flowers at a local shop.  Disguising the shape, size, and/or nature of a gift was popular that season, but one box also contained a wheel of Swiss cheese. Her father helped her pick up all of the orders placed for her, carrying most of them out to the Ford Explorer while she studied an aquarium of goldfish near the store's entrance.  She placed all of the arrangements at various open spaces about her room except for a large one consisting of peach orchids her mother thought would look nice in the dining room.  The flowers made her bedroom a pleasant bower, and she enjoyed the transformation of her normally simple abode for about twenty-four hours, after which she began to feel twinges of annoyance at the jungle of blossoms that soon turned into a full-fledged nausea at the pit of her stomach, and she carried them to the dumpster in three large garbage bags, though one yellow rose fell beside her chest of
drawers which she gave to the cleaning lady.
     Her stomach felt steady by the time the girl went down to breakfast the next morning.  It soon experienced a more sickening feeling than it had the day before, however, when her mother told her that her grandmother had been taken to the hospital the night before after she had called the girl's parents at about two o'clock A.M. To let them know she was having difficulty breathing.  Fear, sorrow, and a desperate desire to deny the situation at hand became one as the girl let the spoon she was holding slide out of her hand onto the table.  Oatmeal in its scalloped china bowl faded into the linen tablecloth with the status of its sudden disinterest to the girl.   She did not begin to feel glimmerings of anger until the car pulled into the hospital parking lot later that morning with her father at the wheel and she and her mother riding along in silence.
     The building towered above the three as they climbed the steps to a side door of the lobby and seemed ready to consider folding into the ground under the weight of its seriousness. Long beige-toned halls allowed the girl and her parents through their stretches.  All of the dying people in the city were packed in here, it seemed to the girl, every door on the right and left and above and below and ahead and behind hiding their faces.  The girl thought of her oboe and wished she had it now so she could hold it close and either breathe into it the most plaintive cry the world had ever heard or break it in two with the most maddeningly silent strength she had ever known.
     Her grandmother was sitting up in bed, looking like every description of a pale heart-attack patient the girl had read and heard about in her life, but with a vulnerability much too personal.  The girl's spirit revived a butterfly-like two millimeters when her grandmother called her a young whippersnapper and started conversing with them all about the tests she had gone through that morning in as calm of tones as if she were discussing a round of errands she had
run.  The family stayed at the hospital all day, reading newspapers and watching T.V. with rather distant manners, and watching the grandmother sleep and talking with her while she was awake--talking, talking, and just talking to hear the sound of her voice--and occasionally wandering our to find some food.  They found out late that afternoon she would need double-bypass surgery.
     The grandmother's surgery was set for a date five days later by the time the girl and her parents left for the night.  They walked out to the car connected by a sober thread, feeling not quite like the selves they were used to, and each consequently  notknowing fully how to relate to the others.  They felt guilty and relieved to leave the grandmother behind in that sterile place to receive the qualified attention of professionals who knew far more about the workings of her body than they.  But who didn't know the way it had used to romp on its knees playing trucks with the girl or stomp out a steady pulse while she practiced the piano.  And who knew nothing about her soul.  The girl and her parents drove to their house, leaving a part of themselves behind, hidden in a small square room where the grandmother suffered in silence.
     The girl practiced her oboe during early morning hours before the visit to the hospital was made each of the next several days.  The day before the bypass was to occur was the only one on which she did not go at it for the full three hours.  She stopped in the middle of the second hour when a June bug thudded against her window while she took a breather after completing a scale on g in harmonic minor.  She lay on her bed until her father poked his head in to say that he and her mother were on their way out the door.  That day she propped herself up in an armchair setting in her grandmother's room for six hours and watched her parents come and go and patients and others pass by in the hallway, and sometimes stared at her grandmother's form under the sheets, and sometimes tried to avoid the sight of it.  A nurse with big hair came in once to do some business with the grandmother.  She tried to cut the girl out of the scene by shielding the bed and the grandmother and the I.V. with her body, but the girl stared daggers into her backside until she was impelled to leave the room, saying her task was complete.  The girl's mother fed the grandmother her mixed vegetables that night while the girl ate her strawberry jello and waited to use the restroom until her father emerged from a lengthy sojourn there with the latest Reader's Digest in hand.
     The girl's grandmother died in surgery the next day.  The girl had been counting on her to regain her health after the bypass, but she didn't realize this at all until she suddenly learned she was gone.  At first she knew they had probably mistaken her grandmother's records for someone else's and would soon wheel the elderly woman in, drained from the procedure, but with every intention of recovering.  However, a deadening calm that started as a pinprick somewhere deep within her so small she didn't even notice it at first soon spread throughout her organs and into every limb and let through just enough of the suffocating smart underneath to tell her what she heard was really true in some dimension.
     When a nurse led the girl and her parents into a single-bed room on the operating floor to say good-bye, the grandmother's body was reclining on two pillows with her hair freshly brushed and a sheet pulled up to her shoulders.  Her closed eyelids were the same blue as the fingernails on the hand protruding from underneath the thin coverlet to rest on her lap.  Staring at the wrinkled skin draped across knuckles and long slender tendons on that hand, the girl began to find it difficult to breathe, and her own flesh seemed to hang upon her with unbearable weight, the smell of Campbell's vegetable soup carried down the hall by a woman waiting for a family member to return from surgery hitting her with the full force of its repugnance, and the girl wanted to run out of the room and knock the substance to the floor and piece together the bits of meat with her own two hands and breathe life into them and set them somewhere on a hillside far away to graze in the sun forever.  Certainly forever.  As for the body lying before her on the bed, the girl thought it probably couldn't be her grandmother because it was only going through some strange stage of sleep she had never seen before, and they said her grandmother was gone. They had taken the grandmother somewhere deep within this concrete labyrinth and cut her off from the land of the living, but the girl had not seen her suffer any last breaths that drew the warmth of life up from within her and out of her nostrils into an invisible mist in response to the convincing whispers of a secret language, and so had no reason to believe the grandmother really had.
     The girl found an irate message from her youth symphony conductor on the family's answering machine when they returned home because she had completely forgotten about a rehearsal for a forthcoming concert with which she was featured in a prominent solo that had been scheduled for that afternoon and had not made any contact with the woman concerning her absence.  The girl waited until the following afternoon to speak with the conductor since she was also the girl's private instructor and she normally had a lesson on Fridays.  Her conductor softened somewhat when she heard about the girl's grandmother, but proceeded to express her disappointment in her irresponsible actions in a rather awkward and strained manner.  The girl left without a lesson that day because an excruciating lump of soreness lodged in her throat kept her breath from functioning properly into her instrument and only seemed good for sending sharp waves of heat upward to force themselves out of her eyes as tears to relieve her dry and feverishly throbbing head.  She didn't regret having missed rehearsal the day before, and in fact found the not-at-all-unpleasant feeling resulting from the knowledge she had offended authority rather freeing.  Though the lyrical and virtuostic oboe melody that soared out from behind her instructor's door as she pulled it shut and the volume of the stereo inside increased also blew an immediate gust of buoyancy beneath her heavy spirits, a reciprocal impulse from other quarters filled her with a passionate desire to dash her instrument to pieces upon the oak-paneled floor.
     On her way home, the girl saw a sparrow lying beneath the bushes at the edge of a park as she ran a stick along the row.  It had obviously been there for a while, its form beginning to mold into the ground and the flesh exposed beneath a wing hanging lopsidedly over its back mottled and gray with death.  She quickly dismissed the occurrence from her consciousness, but the bird's image came back to haunt her the next evening as she entered the funeral home for her grandmother's visitation.  The girl started to turn towards the restroom and claim an upset stomach through shallow breaths, but her father's strong arm propelled her towards the open casket.  The sight of her grandmother lying coifed and slathered with an orange-toned foundation, and with hands folded over a small bouquet of rosebuds on her chest calmed the girl slightly.  The grandmother was so clean and sculpted and proper, perhaps death wasn't as ugly as the bird had made it seem.  Perhaps that entire scenario had only been part of a dream . . . The violence of the sorrow cushioning the girl's angrily palpitating heart did not fit the subdued organ tunes and orderliness of the scene, however, and the girl took up a wire plant stand sitting unused under a coat rack and headed for the nearest window with a euphoric intention to smash a jagged hole opening to the humid summer night, but she tripped over an unobtrusive chair and lay on the cool tile blinking back burning oases of tears instead.  The girl was supposed to play a solo of her grandmother's favorite hymn later that evening, but only got through two phrases before being overcome by the closeness of and visibility of every feature on those lined in rows of folding chairs before her and the force of the text coming to her mind.
     The next day the girl sat with her back against her bed    resting from her oboe practice for about fifteen minutes idly itching a mosquito bite on her leg.  The longer she scratched at it, the more irritating it became, and she started to dig a little more deeply with her fingernails, and to grit her teeth   as her strokes became more and more forceful, and then she aimed directly at the center of the inflamed pink sore with her thumbnail, and gouged into it repeatedly, riding an absent-minded adrenalin until all feeling left her lower leg and she saw dark streaks of blood flow from what was now an open wound . . . Her mother came into the room just then carrying a purple iris in an engraved silver vase sent by friends of the grandmother.  The girl's mother hurried to the hall closet and quickly returned with a box containing first-aid supplies.  She cleaned and bandaged the girl's leg and put her to bed for a nap.  The mother stayed beside the girl holding her hand for a long while after she lowered the shades.   They both cried in the soft light as a scented breeze drifted in from the garden below.