Summary

"Old Spice" is written in the second person, and describes visiting "your grandfather," who tells you about his time as a soldier during the war. He was a communist, and married his first love. Now he lives alone, and you (his grandchild) do not know what to say to him. He is dying, and asks to return to his home so he can see it one more time. You do not know "how to tell him that it won't be/ anything like the way he left it" (29).

In "My Foreign Wife is Dying and Does Not Want to Be Touched," the speaker's wife is diagnosed with breast cancer, and they are afraid. At first, she lets her husband touch her, but as she becomes sicker she refuses to be held. They sit in the hospital together, and the speaker thinks about how the...