She’d been angry when I asked for a bridal magazine for my tenth birthday. I loved looking at those porcelain women, silk dresses cinched tight around their doll waists. They had limbs so thin it seemed as if you could fold them into a box like twisted puppets. I imagined their interior lives as neatly appointed rooms, their emotions like furniture draped with sleek fabric and cut in smooth lines—the calm of self-possession, the tranquillity of being fully desired. I’d seen a picture of my mother in her wedding dress, and it took my breath away—I came from her, I thought, I couldn’t have—but knew I could never give her my admiration, or even a piece of it, because it wasn’t the kind of admiration she wanted.

Grandma Lucy had always been reserved about her body, never used words like “pee” or “snot.” Now she couldn’t hide anything. She had attacks of diarrhea on the couch and on the carpet. She was eating prunes because her pain medication made her constipated. “Maybe the prunes aren’t such a good idea,” I said. She was too frail to get to the bathroom quickly. She walked by balancing one hand against the walls or tables. Her nerves cried wolf; the itching had not abated. She was convinced ginger could help.

“Ginger?” I said. “Why ginger?”

She pulled a folded sheet of yellow paper from her pantry, where it had been tucked behind tins of salt and flour. It showed a map of the human body, covered with Chinese characters and bright red arcs connecting limbs, like an airline poster showing flights between cities. It had been Matilda’s. Grandma Lucy explained as best she could: “She thought everything was all linked up. She thought you could make your stomach feel better if you massaged your toes the right way.” Matilda also had particular ideas about which colors should be the last ones you saw before falling asleep: pale blue and gold. “She painted her ceiling,” Grandma Lucy told me. “Made her bedroom stink like turpentine for days.”

It was Matilda who’d had this crazy notion about ginger, that you should hold it under your tongue until it burned. It would distract you from your other aches. “It’s worth a try,” Grandma Lucy said now. “I haven’t got much to lose.”

Every Tuesday a woman named Juana came to the condo. She’d been working for Grandma Lucy for years. She cleaned and fixed pots of soup that we stored in the fridge all week: turkey chili that looked like dog food, soups thick as paint, chicken noodle with strands of thready meat. Lucy had grown to like baby textures. She had gums that bled like inky pens. Already she’d lost most of her appetite and a lot of weight, too. I had the most luck getting her through a bowl of split pea or bisque, the smooth ones, cream of this or that. When she clutched her spoon, her knobby fingers showed ghostly margins where the larger flesh had been.