Learning how to cut apples

I remember my grandmother had snow-white hair. 

Her eyes were green, different from the brown eyes of her daughter and the cataracts of her husband. They became glassy after she got sick.  

I remember her frail skin when she got cancer and how easily she bruised. I remember her perpetual frown. Although I never saw her after her death, I can only hope the corners of her mouth were not set in an eternal scowl of discomfort. 

My grandmother lived with me for most of my life from my birth, until her passing in 2015. I took the school bus each day from the long and winding driveway that led to our house. I could see her white hair from the end of the road as my bus approached her. She resembled a lone, live beacon of comfort on the foggy afternoons.

When I got off the bus, we walked hand in hand down the gravel path to the house. She seemed so big to me during those years, her body towering over mine. In most of my memories of her, I am at eye level with the hole in her nightgown that sat above her waist. Her nightgown smelled like apple juice and cigarettes, like innocence and agedness.

My grandmother’s oldness never scared me, as it could have frightened many other children. I didn’t see many differences between us, other than her eyes were green and mine were brown. 

As I got older, it was easier to see how alike we were. I mirrored her stubborn and sensitive nature, and our voices sometimes rose and fell in the same cadence. My mother looked like her and I looked like my mother. We all had the same soft nose, rosy lips and tired-looking, wide eyes resembling those of a baby animal.  

A peeled and sliced apple was always waiting for me on the kitchen table after I got home from school, with a small ramekin of caramel sauce next to it. I imagined my grandmother’s frail and veiny hands cupping the apple like a baby bird, slicing it with the gentleness of a mother. The whites of her palms were amplified by the sharpness and blackness of the knife as it sliced through each delicate piece of the fruit.

It seemed as though my grandmother would live as long as I would, that a world without the both of us in it was unimaginable. I hadn’t thought of her sickness as real until the bus dropped me off alone on a cold November day in fifth grade and I found a whole apple on the table instead of a sliced one. I stared and let it sit on the plate for a few minutes before I picked up a knife and put it back down. 

The problem was not that I couldn’t eat unsliced apples or use a knife, but I never had to. My grandmother was always happy to slice it and had done so every day for nearly ten years. 

This break in my routine was not just an adjustment to learning how to cut apples. It was an adjustment of living without my grandmother as a constant in my life and a moment of recognition that her life wouldn’t last nearly as long as I had hoped it would. 

I was forced to learn how to slice apples by myself. The knife grazed my tiny hands many times before I learned how to cut apples without cutting my fingers. As the wounds on my hands healed, the ones on my heart began to scab over, still tender and bruised. 

My mother, however, was more distraught than I had ever seen her. I remember her crying on the front stoop of our porch. I had just taken the bus home from school, and I was eating an apple I had cut up for myself as I sat next to her. She took a slice from my plate and we sat in comfortable silence with the December sun on our faces. 

In the absence of my grandmother, a new routine started. I would cut up an apple with a small dish of caramel and leave it for my mother when she came home from work. The first few times, her eyes teared slightly. She said nothing and smiled. It was my grandmother’s smile: no teeth, but the corners of her mouth rose peacefully. Her small gesture of gratitude was enough for me. 

In taking over her daily routine within mine, I felt closer to my grandmother after her death than I ever had during her lifetime. My hands cupped the apple in the same gentle way that hers did. The young flesh on my hands contrasted the knife in the same ways that her old, paper-like skin did. Though she was gone, in those quiet and solitary moments of slicing and eating, I could’ve sworn I had her with me.

I am writing this essay nine years later, in the same bedroom where my grandmother tucked me in every night. When my mother comes home from work in an hour, there will be a small dish of caramel sauce and sliced apples on the kitchen table for her, and no blood on my fingers.