“Kita Buudee!” he said to the little baby in the stroller. “Allah-alla!” he said. It was the only noise in the stifling square room that passed for the waiting room of the urgent care center. “AHHHHH!” the baby said, not in anger but in awe of the fact that it could make such a noise. The sheer joy of hearing its own voice.
My grandmother has been staying with us for quite some time. Really only a few weeks, but if you have met my grandmother, that is quite some time. She is the kind of person that if something isn’t wrong, then something is wrong. It was thought, some time ago, that she could speak English, but it turns out she can speak only in complaints. Without such complaints, she is mute. Oh, she always has a story to tell and everything is always crashing down.
I had just finished track practice and hobbled into the kitchen. Expecting dinner, I was met with grandma’s brother Doug, his wife Suzie and random bits of food on the stove. There were two bags of corn boiling in a pot. I wasn’t sure if “bag” was the standard unit of corn, but I didn’t question. Next to that was a large clay pot, with a rather unappetizing chicken in it. Grandma was in the corner, holding her hand. Her voice trembled in inexorable amounts of pain.
“I burnt my hand, Zach’ry” she said in a voice that sounded like she had been run over by a truck. And that the truck was still on her chest. After a few minutes of confused conversation (everyone in the house was over 70 and all had hearing problems. I’d ask something, and one would ignore me, the other wouldn’t hear me, and the last would be complaining too loud to notice I said anything.), it was decided that I would go to the pharmacy and pick up “that stuff Pam said was for the burn!”
“It’s like a bandage.” Suzie added.
“Pam said you could put it…you put it on the hand and it makes the burning stop.”
“It’s like a bandage.” Suzie added.
So I went off on my magical quest to CVS, the local pharmacy. I picked up a “Kitchen Burn Kit”, good for all types of minor kitchen burns. Has grandma had just been burned by the steam off the chicken, and it happened in the kitchen, I figured it was a minor kitchen burn and purchased it. I also bought some gummy-savers.
When I got home and presented grandma with her newfound ointment, she refused to use it. She cited the fact that Doug’s son Louie was a doctor, and had said that it could make it worse. She insisted that the prescription kind of ointment was the only kind that could possibly work, not the kind you buy over the counter. I started to wonder why I had gone to the counter at all. But I stood silently and ate some gooey chicken, buttery mashed potatoes and creamy corn. We went to urgent care.
The whole ride was a long synopsis of what had happened to her hand, what she could have done to prevent it, and the quick thinking action that had saved her other hand. Every other sentence was punctuated by a passionate sound that made it apparent that she was in unspeakable pain. “Now, I just picked up that pot its bigger than the pot I have up home your dad has one that is biggur’an what I use and I try to lift that thing and I mean to tell you that it just lifted the lid and the steam came out and I should have been wearing an oven mitt, ‘ats what I should’a done and I just…. Fsssssshhhhhhh. Ahhh….” It was only 4 minutes to the doctor. I counted.
I waited in the waiting room, because it seemed like the thing to do. I watched as a dark-skinned man, who was dressed well with a long black trench-coat and nice black shoes, played with his little baby. The baby would scream out as loud as it could, and say things like “ma ma da da! Bu dee!” The baby would get bored with this, and grab a marker box, slamming it against the stroller. People walked in and out, and I heard the faint conversation by the nurses at the front desk about a guy named Billy, and how she was worried about settling down. I waited for an hour and a half.
On the ride home, my grandma told me what had happened in the doctor’s office, and showed me her bandaged hand, adding that it was wrapped too tightly. She was mostly silent the whole way, tired with her game, no longer in awe of the sound of her own voice.