path that’s anything but a yellow brick road, of my daughter about to be lost to a system I helped create—one stuck-up bitchy comment and one shiny gold privilege card at a time.
Oma waits until I’ve stopped heaving, then speaks. “Tell me about these yellow buses. Where do they go?”
“Kansas.” The voice that says this word isn’t my own. Malcolm has stopped his absent pacing and parked himself halfway up the staircase. “Hello, Maria,” he says. The words might sound kind from anyone else’s lips. “You look well.”
“I look like death,” she says. “There’s no need to lie.”
His eyes seem to agree with her, and he cringes. Not much, but enough for me to catch the distaste in his eyes. Still, I’m thankful he hasn’t used one of his more colorful words: old, feeble, burden on your children. My foot, a few easy inches from his gabardine-encased groin, might just find its way to an unpleasant target. The thought makes me smile.
“Well,” he says, “I’ll let you two catch up.”
“You do that, Malcolm,” I say.
And he leaves, returning to ignore my parents and his younger daughter.
“Still the happy married couple,” Oma says. It’s somewhere between a statement and a question, and I don’t miss the sarcasm in her voice.
“Not really. What happened to you? You look like you haven’t eaten in a month.” I take one of her hands in mine, examine the brittle, ragged nails, the cracked skin stretched taut over knucklebones. Oma’s hair has changed, too, since I last saw her, and when I brush a lock from her unshadowed, unlined eyes, a few strands come away in my fingers before settling on the stair runner.
She’s shedding, I think. Like a malnourished stray.
“I’ve lived too long, Liebchen,” she says.
“Nonsense.”
“It’s the truth. I’ve lived too long, and I’ve seen too much. Now help me up, Liebchen. I want to show you something while we’re alone.”
Oma and I walk down the upstairs hall to her room, a room that used to be mine, with windows overlooking the back garden and, farther past it, the endless rows of new houses. With my help, she arranges herself in a chintz wing chair, and asks me to bring over the ottoman for her legs. Her ankles have disappeared altogether, they’re so swollen.
So this is what old age looks like.
“Oh, Oma,” I say.
She waves a hand in the air, a delicate gesture but dismissive all the same. “Enough of that. Go open the cedar chest in the corner and bring me the blue box—no, not that one. The bigger one, nearer to the bottom.”
I do as I’m told, resting the box in her lap. It’s tied loosely with fraying twine, and she tugs at one of the ends until the bow is nothing more than a pile of curled string. The loops make me think of fat Qs, their tails tentacles.
“You lift the lid for me,” she says, her hands falling limply to her sides as if they have had enough work for one day.
And so I do.
Inside the box are neatly pressed and folded layers of material, blue wool and white cotton. A black necktie lies coiled at one side, its edges worried by dry rot. I can’t imagine why Oma wants me to see her old uniform, not after all these years.
“This was your school uniform?” I say, fingering the coarse blue wool of the skirt.
“It was a uniform,” she says. “But not for school.” Oma still pronounces the soft sh at the beginning of the word. “Take it out if you like. The shoes are in a bigger box in the chest.”
I unfold the items one by one, first the white poplin blouse, which against the bedspread reveals itself to be not white but an aged yellow. I lay the skirt with its center pleat over the blouse’s tails and uncoil the necktie. It’s brittle, and fine black powder rains down on my hands.
“Now the shoes, Liebchen. The marching Schuhe.”
“Oma? Are you okay?”
“The SCHUHE, girl! Get them.” She strikes the