The Best Years of Her Life Are Gone

Bindu Bansinath

My first Auntie used to watch the The Nanny. She loved Fran’s laughter; the theme song with the cheetah-red suit, the promise of a rich man making over the life of a working girl. She wanted to see Mr. Sheffield and Fran get together, but died of some uterine issue before it happened. Before my Auntie died my Uncle divorced her and married a trimmer woman. I loved the first Auntie better, because she was prickly, and because she had no driver’s license and so she watched me when I wasn’t at school. She had no choice.

I sat on the sofa. My Auntie watched The Nanny from the kitchen. When a romantic scene between Fran and Mr. Sheffield played, my Auntie enjoyed it. Also it hurt her. She raised her meat-mallet in the air and cracked it down on a Tyson chicken.

When I heard my Auntie passed it had been years since I had seen her. I tried to grieve for five business days, but I could not muster it, and on the third day I returned to work. I filed things that had piled up in my absence. Once when I was a small girl my Auntie joined me on the sofa and asked me, Do you ever want to die? I said yeah, for the attention.

Then I told her about the only death I knew. It was a girl in my elementary school. She had a voice like gravel and we sat at the same assigned table in class. The girl had many friends; I wasn’t among them. On the playground, kids lined up to push her on the swing. When I pushed her she jumped off at the highest point. The girl landed the wrong way and broke her arm.

It was Christmastime. The next week she returned to school with a green-and-red cast. As everyone signed it in gel pen, the teacher had us go around the room and announce our Christmas plans. My family did not believe in Jesus, so I said, nothing much. The girl and her father were going abroad on a medical mission, near the village where my Auntie was from. It was a difficult place to live. The teacher clapped. How generous! I raised my hand. My family is from there, I said. The teacher smiled crossly. Take care of that arm, she told the girl.

When we got back from break the girl’s seat sat empty. The teacher stood in front of the blackboard, pale and trembling. She told us the girl and her father took a bus from the mission site to a five-star villa. The backroads around the site were shoddy and unpaved; the driver lost control. The girl died. Her father survived—and that to me was the awful part. When my Auntie gave me gummy vitamins in the morning, and two bears were stuck to each other, I ate them together.

The class held a vigil. Each student cradled a fake-flame votive and wept. After weeping we were out-of-breath, like we’d finished running the mile in gym class. I liked that feeling. At home I tried weeping again. But I’d already forgotten the details of the girl’s face. My Auntie said Good, and turned on another Nanny episode. One day you’ll forget mine too.