OMA (Short Story)

His grandmother stands in front of the mirror, and studies herself. Her hair is grey, but there are still black streaks in it, even at her age. She has an enormous bun of hair attached to the back of her head. The bun is covered with netting and attached with pins. He look at it in wonder. So that is what happens with hair. It can come to you from the inside, it can come to you from the outside. It’s all her hair, his mother tells him when he asks her. But it’s a collection of all the hair she has lost over time. Sort of like a reclamation project.

   She always dresses in dark clothes. Black, brown, dark blue, olive green. Her eighty year old feet are stuck in black slippers that are decorated with a pattern of tiny coloured pinheads. Her legs are different from any other legs he has seen in his short life. Instead of her veins being on the inside, they have worked themselves to the outside. He studies them whenever his grandmother’s eyes are not on him. The veins are behind stockings, so he can only see their outlines. They look like bootlace worms. Worms may be thin and flat in one place, and thick and lumpy in another. His grandmother has four or five of those, running vertically, on each of her lower legs.

   This woman is his best friend, so far. She is the only giant in the house. They call her oma, but his parents call her mother. His mom’s voice carries a mixture of worry and deference when she utters the word mother. He feels neither worry nor deference when he thinks of oma. She is his advocate and the arbiter of his rights. She tempers penalties and restores justice where justice is wanting.

   At night, she is a different woman. Her hair hangs down, there is no bun, and her dress is white with little blue and lilac flowers on it. “You come with oma, sweetheart”, she says to him. He slips into her single bed and lies there with her, until she pats him on the back and tells him that he can go upstairs.

   In the afternoons, she sits at her round coffee table and does crosswords. She fills the recycled pages of the book, one by one. He slips into the room and sits in the chair across from her. Usually he visits her because he wants to hear a song or because he wants a cookie. Today it is a cookie he wants. “You get that little jar for grandma, and let me see what I have”, she tells him. He gets the jar, a metal box with a bakery on a snow covered town square on the lid. But instead of giving it to her, he opens it with his nimble four-year old fingers, checking with his grandmother’s eyes that watch him over her cat-eye glasses. She counts the number of cookies in the box, and hands him one.

   He has been told not to let the cat into her room. The cat must not get in. If it does, bad things will happen. He never did let the cat in of course, but on this day, the cat managed to slip past him as he enters oma’s room, somehow. He hears the cat, a black and white tabby that they have had for a year and a half, running around inside. His grandma gets up to catch it, and the cat, not to be outdone, starts zooming around the place. Later on, he has no recollection of his grandmother falling, but this evidently is what happens, because next she is down on the floor, on her back, in between her armchair and the coffee table. Before long, his father and mother are also in the room. “He’s sweet, he didn’t do anything”, oma advocates from the floor. He feels the reproach and fury of his parents in his neck. He is anticipating impact. He does not dare to look behind him. It’s not physical impact that he fears, but wrath; the cavernous feeling of love withdrawn. Several minutes later, there are sirens in the street. He is being ushered out of the room as oma is being strapped onto a stretcher and carried out of the house. She is almost vertical as they carry her down the stairs. His mother afterwards says that it was like a body was being removed and she hopes that it’s not a bad sign.

   For the next weeks, there is no grandma. They get daily updates from the hospital. As was expected, the x-rays reveal a broken hip. She requires a new head on the femoral bone on the right side. They learn through the updates that “she needs a new head”, that “the head is now ready”, and that “they are putting the new head on”. On the day that oma returns from the hospital, she again occupies her seat at the dinner table. He sit over across from her, beside his big brother. Grandma seems to have worked up an appetite in the hospital. One of the defining features of her head has always been her double chin. Apart from the veins and the bun, it’s the main thing he watches. It’s a turkey neck. Tonight, he watches her neck, her ears, her nose. Big people are usually right about things, but he feels very sure. He goes up to his mother in the kitchen as she puts the dishes in the sink.

   “I was looking at oma.”

   His mother ignores him and gathers the cutlery from the plates.

   “Did you see oma, mom?”

   “Of course I saw her.”

   “But did you look?”

   “I looked when she came back. But now we’re eating. You bring these bowls inside.               I’m almost done.”

   Once back at the dinner table, he picks his spoon up and sets it upright with the handle touching the table.

   “Mom, look.” He taps the spoon handle on the table and points his finger at grandma, who is just taking the first spoonful of her desert. His mother looks at him with mild irritation. His finger is still pointing at his grandma’s face. “You and dad and everyone said she has a new head. It’s the same old head.”

   The other thing he notices that night is a grey metallic walking stick, hanging over the back of grandma’s chair. That stick will now be her new companion, thanks to him.

   His aunt Corrie, the wife of his mother’s brother, has decided to take his grandma out for a day trip. She does this regularly. His mother tells him afterwards that as they drove off, she was making faces at them through the window, and that everyone was in fits of laughter. Twenty minutes later, there is a call from the police that both his aunt and his grandmother have died in a head-on collision with another vehicle. His grandmother’s body was thrown out of the car by the impact, and his aunt had died behind the wheel of a ruptured liver. That evening, the shock of death is on his mother’s face. There is no dinner. His father makes porridge for him and his brothers, which they eat at the kitchen table instead of in the living room.

His grandmother lived on the first floor at the end of the hallway of our house. Every day now as he goes to bed, he says to his father: “We don’t have to say goodnight to oma now.”

   “No”, he answers, “Oma is in heaven.”

   “How did she get up to heaven?”

   His dad is momentarily addled. He waits for a beat before answering. He breathes out audibly through his large nose. He breathes in again just as audibly, like he’s taking his breath in through a straw. “I don’t know how she got there. But it happened on the day of the accident. You can be sure of that.”

   “But first she went through the cycle shack.”

   “No. Oma never came to the cycle shack. We had the coffin there and everything.    But by that time oma was already in heaven.”

   He is adding this all together without arriving at any sort of solution. “So if oma was in heaven then why do they have a coffin?”

   “Well. If a person dies, their body is in the coffin but their heart goes to heaven. And that’s how it was with oma. Her body was in the coffin but her heart went to heaven.”

   “They sent her heart to heaven?” His dad is standing against the door of his bedroom. The expression on his face tells him that he wants to go back downstairs. But he has questions. In his mind he is seeing his grandmother’s heart excised like the heart in the Jesus statue. Jesus was wearing a big red heart on the outside of his chest, with a ribbon around it, a broad gold ribbon like the ones they put around gift boxes. That must be the same thing that happened to oma. There are all sorts of procedures he doesn’t know about.

   “So the heart comes out and it goes to heaven. Is that why your heart stops when you die?”

   “No”. His dad seems quite sure that this is wrong. “Not the heart, not the heart. The heart doesn’t really come out.” He makes a waving movement with his hand in front of his chest. “But the person inside.”

   “She had another person inside? Is it like a ghost?”

   “Precisely, It’s her ghost.”

   “Like one that you can see through.”

   “Like a see-through ghost.”

   “So why then did you say the heart?” He still has the feeling that certain details of what actually happens are being kept from him. His father does not answer and instead tells him that he needs to go to sleep.

   The next day, he asks his mother about this. “Oma is in heaven, right?”

   “Yes, sweetheart”, she says, “She is in heaven.”

   “Her ghost is in heaven.”

   “No, don’t say that. Oma is in heaven. There is no ghost.”

   “But papa said that when you go to heaven it’s like your ghost goes to heaven.”

   His mother shakes her head. “No. Papa never said that.”

   “And aunt Cor is in heaven. They both went together.”

   His mother is silent for a moment, and her face grows serious. “Aunt Corrie didn’t love the Lord very much”, she says, wistfully.

   “Aunt Corrie didn’t love the Lord? Why not?”

His mother shakes her head. “I don’t know why. But she didn’t love Him very much.”

   “But as they both went together…and oma went to heaven.. don’t you think Corrie could just come along with her? On the same ticket?”

   His mother sighs but does not answer.

   “Did aunt Corrie go to hell?” He think perhaps there is another option open for aunts and people like that, but he can’t think of what it would be. He does know that purgatory does not exist because that’s what the Catholics teach.

   “We don’t know. But she didn’t love the Lord very much.”

   From this he concludes that aunt Corrie probably didn’t make it to heaven, which means that she must have gone to hell. His mother however was not going to affect her own state of grace by sending her there. He imagines them there on the road. His grandmother going up to heaven accompanied by the angels, or at least one of them, and aunt Corrie going down through the car chassis and the tarmac on her one way journey into hell. Death is not easy when you don’t love the Lord.

   Oma’s room was cluttered with furniture. Dark, rounded and varnished pieces covered with trinkets, picture frames, clocks, and postcards. He’s not sure what happens to all these items after the funeral. All he knows is that suddenly, the room is light and empty and twice as big. It turns out to be just a plain rectangular room like all the rest, not the cave it was when it was his grandmother’s lair. Hemas, his next brother, two years his senior, gets oma’s room. That boy is already coming into his inheritance. After his brother moves in, it becomes a different space altogether. You can now see the balcony door. The room looks light and cheerful.

   His brother’s room is usually open, the door stands ajar. Sometimes during the day, Mrs Bomans is in there to clean. Or his mother. But usually it’s empty before three o’clock. He does the rounds inside of his brother’s new room in the early afternoon when he is still in school. His books are all lined up, his shirts are folded in the cupboard. Inside that cupboard he has a glass jar with coins. This jar is secured with a transparent lid. It’s maybe one third filled. Money is a magical property, to his mind. It may not look like much, but it transforms itself into a million different articles. Everything translates into money and money translates into everything. Moreover, some expensive things are worthless and some of the best things in life are cheap. Like toy soldiers and sweets. It’s the genie in the jar. It’s a make-a-wish charm. After watching the jar for a few weeks, he tells himself: There is a whole pound’s worth of good luck going on in that glass. Look at it. If someone were to pick a few coins out of there, not one of the big ones, but maybe just quarters, would anyone ever notice? My bet would be no. It would be impossible to notice. There’s simply too much money. A whole pile of it. One day, with an electric current running all the way from his shoulder to his elbow and down to the tips of his fingers, he reaches inside of that glass jar and fishes out for himself not just two quarters, but also, as a bonus for his cunning and courage, a ten cent piece. Voila, voila. There’s a rumble some place deep in his gut as he slides the coins into his back pocket and slips out of the room. This is how you make someone else’s room your own.

   Now every time he visits his brother’s room, he fishes a coin out of his jar. Don’t they do that thing with coins for good luck? Call it duty, call it taxes, call it a shared family inheritance. He gets his own pocket money, but he gets a mere half of what his brother gets. He gets half because he’s two years younger. He’s disgusted. He marks the level in the jar. That level should always be going up, never down. It’s important. Sometimes he takes a ten cent piece, sometimes a quarter. Occasionally, if he’s been very good, he affords himself maybe thirty-five cents, though never as much as the sixty cent haul that he awarded himself on that first day.

   Does he feel guilty? he does not quite entertain the thought of guilt. The dividends are too good for now. And he reminds himself that he lives in a cruel and unusual household, the subjects of which are left to mete out their own justice and compensation as they see fit. Judiciously. When his mother next gives him pocket money, he feels he’s not worthy. She keeps a small leather purse with a ball snap clasp in the kitchen cupboard. He takes his guilder and puts it back into the purse.

   “Mom”, he says to her. “Did you check your purse today?”

   “Yes, I think so. I think I checked it.”

   “Did you notice anything?”

   She looks at him quizzically as she closes the fridge. Now he’s not sure how to proceed. He doesn’t want to give the game away and say he put the money back into her purse. He decides the best thing is just to repeat the question. “Did you notice anything different?”

   His mother keeps looking at him, but she does not say anything. Finally she says “No. Is something missing?”

   This is the moment for him to melt into his frosted confession. His sugar frosted confession. “I put my pocket money back into your purse.” He watches his mother’s face with expectation.

   “Now that’s very lovely of you. But that guilder is not for me. That guilder is for you.” His mother’s reply is matter-of-fact and unsentimental. It is not the reaction he wanted. And he still didn’t get his guilder back.

   A week later his mother asks him. “Hemas says that money has gone missing from his jar. Four guilders and sixty cents. I asked Mrs Bomans and she says she doesn’t know.”

   “That’s strange”, he says.

   “You didn’t take anything, maybe by accident, did you?”

   “No.” He shakes my head and feels around for what conviction is at hand. His mother’s words go through his mind like lightning, with a zigzag motion, separating two halves of him and causing them to fall down with a thud; the liar and the thief.       “Maybe he made a mistake. How does he know?”

   “Well he counts it every week. And he’s very sure that money is missing.”

   “Oh”, he says.

   His brother counts his money. He has been counting his brother’s money as well, very carefully in fact, and he was quite sure that the level in the jar was still going up, the last time he checked. But now his brother is removing all the coins from his jar and counting every single little coin and adding all the values together into one big sum. It had never occurred to him that it was even possible to do such a thing. It feels like a betrayal. It is a betrayal, he is quite sure. And why? What would move him to do a thing like that? Wasn’t money made for spending?