Her room is across the hall from a bathroom and there is one old man – like her, a resident of the place – who forgets to shut the door when he goes to use the john. My grandmother shouts at him and he looks up, startled; the nurses come to clean his urine off the floor. In a rage he steps into my grandmother’s room but before he can say anything she raises her voice. “What are you sleeping with that shanty woman for?” she yells. She’s confused him with my grandfather Bill, who (family legend has it) ran off with a prostitute, an “oil field woman,” in the thirties. “She teases me,” my grandmother says to the old man. “She comes to me at night and tells me I won’t ever sleep with you again. Then she ties my bed to a gelding and he runs me around a field, fast and dizzy, and the whole time she’s laughing. In the mornings when the women here bathe me she’s outside my window and I try to hide my body but they won’t let me. They want to show her what I’ve become.
What do You think about The Woman In Oil Fields (1996)?
