The BedroomAuthor(s): April NewmanSource: The Iowa Review, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Spring, 2008), pp. 46-47Published by: University of IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20536940 .

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APRIL NEWMAN

The Bedroom

The bedroom had dark plank floors with one rug poking out in the

center. The walls were yellow behind a painting of wild mustangs

galloping through a mountain range, their muscles statuesque. Grandma kept quarters in turquoise beaded purses from South

Dakota on her dresser, the brown-edged photos of her children

jammed into the sides of her mirror. In the corner was a black roll

top writing desk. She placed a photo of her father, Donald, there.

Grandma died in that bed. The same one where her children

were conceived. She died skeletal thin and skin faded the color of

a sliced pear, almost translucent, her shoulder bones and clavicle

pronounced; eyes pinched and sunken. A delta of wrinkles fanned

softly toward her ears, and her lips were flat and nearly purple. My Persian cat, Walter, folded himself into her side as she lay dying. In her morphine delirium, she called out names of schoolmates,

strangers to us.

"When I die you have to play Beulah's Boogie. And dance. And I

mean it," she had told everyone on different occasions; she may have been dangling a cigarette. Of course I promised. But when it

actually happened, I wasn't nearly ready to dance.

She waited until all of her children and grandchildren were in the

house, blown in from the road or down the street?all tattered like

wet newspapers. She passed exactly two hours after I stepped off

the plane from Florida. I don't know how she realized I was finally home, her eyes like clamps in that yellow room, the light now cus

tard around us.

When it happened, the cat jumped up and out of her arms, run

ning with his body crouched close to floor, his hair raised high up like a ridge on his back. Half a dozen people crowded her bed, sit

ting on the edge or standing near the window sill. They checked her

pulse; they felt her lips for signs of life with their trembling fingers.

They murmured and cried out, but everyone was still touching her

as she melted away. One of my aunts turned on Beulah's Boogie almost immediately. It

sounded loud enough to fill a football stadium, the jazz horns blaz

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ing as they zipped her up in a black bag and rolled her out of the

bedroom for the last time?this time on a gurney. Dance! But my

legs were a zombie's, arms made of rope, and the whole scene felt

filtered through a lens smeared with butter. Dance! Time had turned

on its ears. Dance! We have to dance! And even though my wrists

weighed a thousand pounds, for her I raised my hands.

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