virginia chase sutton
Devolution of a Scent
*
As a child, I love your scent, Tigress Cologne, drifting down two sets of stairs into my room as you ready for school. Sticky sweet dime store odor, you are a well-dressed goddess. Remember when you and my father chaperone prom at the high school where you teach? Your pricey orange gown of gauze and tulle, with shoes and handbags to match? Your hair done as usual but higher, and false eyelashes flit like hummingbirds, deep green sixties eyeshadow to match your eyes. In the living room you twirl for your audience—my father, sister, and me. Stickiness of scent reeks after you live, corsage in place. Whose dance is it anyway?
*
Gloomy Sunday’s blasting on the stereo downstairs, timeless music, which means you’re deeply depressed and very drunk, having switched to bourbon from martinis. Lady Day croons. Later you slam into my room to berate me. You terrify me, grab my cheeks with an iron grip, my mouth popping open: a fish. You tell me, I love you so much it hurts saying I love you, something you wouldn’t say sober. I’ve a close-up view of your bloodshot eyes, overpowering layers of booze.
*
My sister, one year younger, finds you one morning passed out on the bathroom floor in a puddle of stale urine. We must climb over you to use the toilet. You’re already ruined your single bed, the cushions on the couch you love so much. And now this: get up, get up, my sister begs. The stench never leaves the house. Sniff for piss. It’s everywhere.
*
On Christmas Day, you and my father, both chain-smokers, drive to southern Indiana from our Chicago suburb, unwilling to crack a window though my asthmatic sister begs. You ignore us, flicking bits of tobacco from your fingerprints as you light another Camel straight. You entertain your male students when your husband, a traveling salesman, is out of town, with cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana. Attired in a hip pink tent dress, you stay up with them for hours despite needing to grade papers. Instead it’s gossip, seances, sometimes sex with a favorite. I peek at the rowdiness, halfway up the stairs. I hear the roar of cars as they leave, nearly dawn.
*
Later, after the brain aneurysm, after my father leaves you for another woman following thirty-plus years of marriage, you smash a pretty dish onto the fireplace hearth. It’s your only wedding gift after eloping at eighteen. I trundle you into a cheap apartment. Newlywed, I must visit each day after work, do the chores you can’t. I bathe you monthly, all you’ll allow. I ride the waves of your scent. Paralyzed on your left side, I undress you, settle you into the hydraulic bath chair, lower you into the water. Soak, I say but minutes later you curse my name. Your sour left hand still smells, as it is permanently curved inward, a large shell. You could open it in warm, soapy water, but choose not to do so. So your hand stinks, but you’redone with the dirty tub. I dress you, inching your dead foot into socks, shoe, and leg brace as you rain swear words.
Holding you close in our embrace I wonder what’s the good of a decaying body?
*
Later still, you have another stroke. Complete paralysis. You are forced to live like this---oh, the indignities. Living like this for five years, hired help assists you to smoke---your only pleasure---your mouth orange from nicotine. Aides attempt to bathe you as you dangle in the air, screaming with the help of the Hoyer Lift. It scoops you from your bed, your prison. Into the shower you go, bellowing. Your hair is never washed. You don’t want cleanliness.
*
At sixty-two, a final stroke leaves your brain stem destroyed. I sit in a chair beside your hospital bed, my seven-year-old daughter in my lap. Talk to her, a well-meaning nurse says. She can hear you. We sit in silence. There aren’t any happy memories---no birthday parties, family outings, goofy stories. All I recall is cruelty. My daughter and I watch your body, left and right arms slowly uncurling from their tight embrace, fingers relaxing, hands open. Mottled skin rides your flesh as you die, bit by bit. The room’s awash in medical smells. We’re nearly drowning in your stink, the kind that makes your granddaughter cover her nose. Death’s creeping forward, your eyes staring at the ceiling. The room silent except for the staccato gasping of your final felon’s rattle.
Virginia Chase Sutton's second book, What Brings You to Del Amo, winner of the Morse Poetry Prize, has just been reissued as a free ebook by Doubleback Books. Her first is Embellishments and her third is Of a Transient Nature. Sutton's chapbook, Down River, was released last year. Her work has won a poetry fellowship to Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, and the National Poet Hunt. Seven times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Laurel Review, Ploughshares, and Peacock Journal, among many other literary magazines, journals, and anthologies. Sutton holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives in Tempe, Arizona, with her husband.