Swim

magic she could do, a gesture, a shift in posture, a subtle rearrangement of her features that turned her into someone else. “I didn’t think he was going to answer me—you know, he never talks—but, after a minute, he said . . .” I leaned forward, all of my pain forgotten, until she said, “Do you have tea?”
    “So what did you do?”
    “Made him a cup of tea, of course, and I gave him some of those thumbprint cookies.”
    “Apricot or raspberry?”
    “One of each,” she said, and reached into the Tupperware container she had in her purse and put two of the cookies in question onto my tray. As I began to crumble the cookies into manageable bits that would dissolve slowly on my tongue, she performed her nightly ritual, touching my face gently, examining the bandages, running her thumb from my forehead to my chin on the unblemished cheek. “Is it bad today?”
    “Not so bad,” I would say, even if it wasn’t true. I knew what would happen if I told Grandma it hurt. She would rise instantly to her feet. “Excuse me for a moment,” she would say, her voice low, her face calm. I would hear the sound of her heels tapping briskly down the hall . . . and then I’d hear her voice, which would start off low and reasonable, then get louder and louder, her Boston accent growing more and more broad. Why is my granddaughter in pain? Your job is to manage her pain. Now go do your job, or let’s find someone who can, because this situation is unacceptable. Ruth is eight years old and she’s been through enough.
    I didn’t want the nurses or the doctors to be angry at me. Worse, I didn’t want them to think I was weak. If I couldn’t be pretty, in the manner of girls, I’d decided I could be brave, like a boy or a superhero, impressing strangers not with my beauty but by how much I could endure.
    “I’m fine,” I would tell her. It was my ritual response, and, once she’d heard it, Grandma would clear my dishes, scraping or pouring the leftovers into the trash can, rinsing cups and plates in the bathroom sink and piling them into the tote bag she’d brought. Then, with the door closed and, if I had a roommate that night, the curtain around my bed drawn, she’d take off her shoes, turn on the television set, and get into bed beside me.
    We would watch TV every night for an hour, from eight to nine, my daily allotment of what Grandma sometimes called “the idiot box.” The Cosby Show and Who’s the Boss, reruns of Star Trek, and Murder, She Wrote, my grandmother’s preferred program . . . but our favorite, shown in reruns, was The Golden Girls. I loved them all, sarcastic Bea Arthur and sexy Rue McClanahan and sweetly clueless Betty White. I loved that they were friends, living together in an eight-year-old’s fantasy of an every-night slumber party. I loved that Bea Arthur’s Dorothy still lived with her mother, and nobody thought it was strange. In my fantasies or, sometimes, in the strange and oddly vivid dreams I’d have after the nurses would give me painkillers, Grandma and I lived in that house. We’d sit in the kitchen, drinking coffee, making jokes, waiting for Blanche to come home from whatever misadventures she’d had the night before, or for Rose to tell us a story about life in St. Olaf, or Dorothy to talk about her husband, the late Stan Zbornak.
    In Florida, where the Golden Girls lived, the weather was always warm and the skies were always sunny, and no crisis could not be managed in twenty-two minutes plus two commercial breaks. In that happy land, not everyone was beautiful, or young, or perfect. Not everyone had romantic love. But everyone had friends, a family that they’d chosen. It was that love that sustained them, and that love could sustain me, too
    That was television for me, a dream of a perfect world, one where I fit in, one where I belonged. It was homemade butter cookies with dabs of jam in their centers, the sun setting outside my window and the air conditioner wheezing away and my grandmother next to me, smelling of Aqua-Net and Shalimar, with one arm around my shoulders, her cheek resting on my head. Some nights, exhausted and in pain, dopey with drugs, I would imagine that the glass of the set would soften like taffy, would melt and part and let me in. I’d stick one finger through the screen, then two fingers, then my hand, my wrist, my arm, my shoulder. I would part the glass as if it was a curtain, and I’d walk into the Golden Girls’ ranch house and