Chapter XXXXVI Forever Young
Chapter Forty-Six: Forever Young
“Your father told me you're going to court tomorrow, dear. Is that true? Oh, dear. When are you going to shave that...beard? How was your fun little trip? Hasn't your father suffered enough?”
True to form, the old bag of bones asked three or four unrelated questions at once followed by a rhetorical attack. If there is a hell, and I most certainly will find out, my grandmother will greet me with a plate of cookies and a list of requests to be fulfilled before I can have one. The first request will be to rub her feet. I'll lift the blankets and find that she does not have feet. She has no legs.
“I can't do it,” I'll say. “You don't have any feet.”
“Then no cookie for you.”
On and on like that forever. Hell. But what can one do in these positions except punch the clock and put in your 9 to 5?
“It's nothing, Grandma. I'll shave when I feel like it. The trip was a great success. Who knows how much more my father can suffer? He'll find out, I'm sure. Would you mind blowing that smoke in the other direction. Maybe you can give the dresser emphysema instead of me.”
She blew the smoke in generally a perpendicular direction from me, over her splayed out legs on the fold-a-bed mattress where she had spent the last five years accepting visitors and abusing them. She pretended that the slight change in body position hurt her in some way. She groaned, made a pained face, went through the whole refugee act. When she recovered she went on.
“Well, when your father was your age he had better manners than you...but why would you care? You only care about yourself.”
“No kidding?”
“You've probably ruined that violin I gave you for Christmas. So sad. No doubt it has been abused and now lays under your bed covered with newspaper.”
She really laid into her sigh this time.
“Actually, I'm a bootblack now so it helps when I don't have any shoes to shine. I play it a little and people throw me quarters. I'll make five dollars a day in the summer,” I said with a smile. “I'll be able to pay off my shine box in two or three years at that rate,”
I looked into the kitchen where my 90 year-old grandfather was trying to direct my 55 year-old father as he took out the trash.
“Tie it! No! Do it!”
The words weren't coming to him.
“I can do it, Dad. Look. I can do it. Do you want to do it?”
“God damn it!”
“Then let me do it.”
My grandmother was crying when I turned my head back toward her.
“What have I ever done to you? Why aren't you ever nice to me.”
“Aw, Christ. Fine, blow your smoke in my face. It isn't like you haven't before.”
She started to cough and cry at the same time. It appeared she was forcing herself to cough, almost willing herself to die so I would be to blame. I'm telling you, the first thing I hear in hell will be, “How did you like that sweater I knitted for you? Why don't you wear it?”
From the other room: “God damn it!”
“I can do it. Daddy! I can do it.”
“Tissue!”
I handed my grandmother a box of tissues. My jaws were bulging. I sighed deeply, then laughed weakly as I remembered Lacy throwing an apple at me in Poncho before tossing Word Up out the window. What was in store for my shine box next?
My grandmother took two tissues and blew her nose loudly before she deposited the dirty tissues in the area between her legs. She was watching a soap opera. An overdressed woman was telling an older woman with leathery skin that she just couldn't take it anymore. Take what, I don't know. Maybe money for her acting. I stared at the younger woman's prominently displayed cleavage. My grandmother changed the channel to a cooking show. I was not thinking, “This sucks!” I was thinking, “Why did I think it would be better this time?”
“I've been hard on you because I love you. I loved both of you and now think of what has happened to poor Brooklyn. I can't take it.”
Did she realize that she had just repeated the woman on the soap opera's lines? She didn't appear to be listening to the television. She turned a rheumy eye to Brooklyn's Army photo. An American flag was folded and framed above it.
Said I, “Nothing has happened to Brooklyn.”
“Your poor brother tried so hard to do the right thing. Now he's gone.”
“Brooklyn is in Virginia. He isn't dead. We just talked to him at Christmas.”
From the kitchen: “Shit! Shit Shit Shit!”
“See! There! Tie it! God damn it!”
The trash bag had broken and my father's stress level was going up like a Jim Rice home run. Garbage fell onto the warped floor. Was my role here to keep Grandma entertained while my father did the household chores so his own father could demean and harass him? Was it any wonder I turned out the way I did?
The woman on the television was demonstrating a “blend technique” for three eggs and six ounces shredded lamb and half a cup of chopped onions. It was for some sort of quiche.
“How long will you be in jail for? You know that you'll have to eat meat in jail.”
She added this part about the meat almost gleefully, like it made her day to know my principles would be broken.
“Come on. It is a small claims court. Some one is blaming me because they couldn't drive. I'm not going to jail. I'm not even going to lose the case. Dewey promised.”
“I always hoped you'd be in a courtroom, but not as a defendant. I hoped...”
She started to cough and cry. The velvet throne act.
“I have a lawyer you can call. Maybe Brooklyn knows someone. He's in the Army.”
“Brooklyn? What are you talking about? One second you talk about him like he's dead and then you want me to call him for advice about a lawyer? There won't be a need for a lawyer. I've studied law.”
The cook on television presented a completed omelet for the audience.
“Grill the omelet for three minutes in browned butter and just a touch of garlic powder and look!”
The studio audience clapped, but I was squinting to see the cook's breasts under her apron. There was nothing there. Not even a shadow of a bump. She'd probably had both removed from cancer and this pitiful show was a way to help her recover. I could almost see where her wig was taped on her balding, liver spotted head. It felt good to be mean, but only for a second. Then I felt bad. I looked at the clock above the television. I had only been in the house for half an hour. In Hell there would be a clock just like the one above the television.
“No need? You said there wasn't a need to go to a doctor when your poor foot was hurt. Remember that? Remember when you said there was no need to apply to other colleges because you were going to stay in Alaska and you only stayed there one semester? You poor boy. You poor, poor boy. You've suffered so much and now this. First your parents divorce and leave you and poor Brooklyn all alone. Then your dream of being a baseball player is taken away. How do you and Brooklyn survive? You poor things. You poor, poor boys. You've traveled so much. Why can't you settle down? Your father told me you drove around the country. Is that your idea of conserving resources? You used to care so much about the earth.”
Her lungs rattled wetly like Mack's in the spring of 1984.
“What do you want me to do, Grandma? Tell me how to fix my life. Just tell me. I'll do it. You're the one on the velvet throne, not me. I'm just a bootblack.”
“Oh, I've lived one life already. I don't have the strength to live another.”
See? The cookie. Rub the feet. No feet. No cookie. I can't win, I'm telling you.
To avoid paying attention to grandma I developed a drama for the balding, dying woman who cooked on television. Once she was under my control, I gave her children and then took the youngest one away in a bike accident. Maybe the garbage truck ran over him when he was trying to surprise her on mother's day by taking the trash out. What a good little mother's helper. I liked that because it had both drama and sentimentality. It tugged at the emotions of the weak, was very Stephen King, very Hollywood, but it lacked sex so I decided that she and her husband were making love at the time they heard the trash-men's screams for help. Neither had reached orgasm yet. Ha! Then I decided that instead of her husband (that was too predictable) she would be making love to her husband's best friend. Yes! The husband had already gone to work for the day and her secret lover had come calling and they were having sex and little Roddy or Frank Jr. or Benjamin Jr. goes out to take the trash to the curb and gets run over. Yes! On Mother's Day. Then I realized that the affair with her husbands best friend wasn't erotic enough. So I decided she was having an affair with her husband's female secretary. She as a lesbian. That was it! She wanted a recipe? I'll give her a recipe. I'll give her a recipe for misery. First a double mastectomy and then the youngest kid, Benjamin Jr., killed, crushed by a garbage truck during the last weeks of the Chemotherapy. Oh, how tragic. Boo, hoo! The reviews would read “Gripping Tragedy. Heartrending. Gritty Human Drama. Chilling. The best film of the year.” The husband fake a depression so he would not feel guilty divorcing the withered woman. The passion was gone and the marriage counselor wasn't helping. Then I decided that the marriage counselor, and not the secretary, was the woman who had been sleeping with the wife. That kept the plot simple enough for your Joe addicted to Prozac and Nascar.
My mouth watered at the thought of so much pain experienced by other people. Perfect Schadenfreude. Wasn't that what movies, books, and art provided: The chance to watch another's misery unfold and laugh at them? You experience no guilt because it isn't really happening, at least not to you. You almost want them to stumble deeper into sadness and despair. Why not? It's just fiction. Stephen King recognizes this need, this hunger to witness another's misfortune, and pumps out books to meet the demand. He knows that characters need to have their dreams taken away and then dangled in front of them and just out of reach.
I imagined a photo of Benjamin on the refrigerator next to his ugly, disjunct crayon pictures of mom and dad holding hands. Then, because it was my invention, I burned all his pictures and tiny clothes while his mother drank whiskey. Her lover had committed suicide (her own guilt ghosts) and her husband never called. Too bad. But she miraculously recovers and starts a cooking show for daytime television addicts on Channel 65. I could see her hands shaking as she turned on a blender to make a power drink for the “woman on the go.” I knew where she would go right after the director yelled cut. She would run back to the dressing room and suck down whiskey and pain killers and stare at her ugly self--her wig on the bare countertop--in the mirror and almost hear Benjamin calling, “Momma, momma! Look what I did. I took out the trash.” She would find the dress she first wore on her first rendezvous with her lover, but she doesn't fit in it anymore because the chest sags for lack of breasts. Schadenfreude
“...town. No one else ever knew. I cried all day.”
My grandmother was finishing some allegory intended to humiliate me, I was sure. I nodded as though I gave a flying Grace Jones what she was saying.
“All day long,” She repeated for emphasis. Her cigarette had gone out or maybe she was trying to light a new one, but she could not light the match with her frail hands. She tried again, holding her breath and raising her arms and trying to scrape the match across the packet. Another failure that gave me some pleasure though I felt at some level she was doing this for my benefit or maybe as punishment. Remember the cookie in hell? The two, benefit and punishment, blended together like the fruit and wheat germ the chemo lady was putting into a blender. Finally, my G. mother held them out to me with an Annie Orphan sigh. I took the match and the match book in my hands. She leaned half an inch in my direction by pivoting on her pillow.
“Do you know how many calories this has? Guess. 400? No. 300? Lower. Not even 150. 110 calories per serving. Isn't that great? Something to get you going in the morning that is healthy and fresh and natural.” (Applause)
I leaned close enough to smell the mixture of nicotine, vodka and death that was my grandmother's breath. I examined her decaying skin. It had the texture and color of a well-used leather football. I had an urge to tear it off her and expose the real person under it. I imagined that she would survive being skinned alive and her skull would lie there sucking in the cigarette while the smoke filtered between her vertebrae. I looked at her dying image and thought. Will you die?
Maybe I had been whispering the words because she rolled her skull in my direction, wearily, like a woman who doesn't want to have sex but is giving in. Her thin hair allowed me to see the contours of her skull, the dents and curves. Her lips worked the cigarette. My hate for her eclipsed into a realization of something that my father must have long ago understood. Her evil was that she made me evil. What more can a deposed ruler do? My wishing her dead was her ultimate victory because it exposed the egg shell thin nature of my peaceful convictions. It was just like The Empire Strikes Back.
She lifted one of her thin lips, lips I could not imagine kissing from anything more than pity, and the cigarette fell from them. I picked it up from the gray sheets and placed it gently back in her mouth. She blinked and her lips curled in contempt. I struck two matches at the same time to be sure they would light and stay lit. The sulfur fumes split the smell of perfume and the skin lotion (Cow udder cream) she used. I leaned into the plume, inches from her mouth, and sensuously raised the lit matches to the cigarette. The tip of the cigarette caught on fire and glowed as she sucked on it. She pulled the smoke as deep as it would go into her shriveled lungs and then blew it out toward my face. It parted, strong and warm over the bridge of my nose. Her tongue emerged from her mouth, a pink bulb, and she licked her dry lips. I tossed the matches in an ashtray.
When she turned back to the television I got up and walked to the bathroom and tore my pants down and looked at my face in the mirror. I looked both surprised and guilty. My guilt faded into cunning relief as I cheated death again. There was no cookie. There were no feet. I pulled my pants up. After washing my hands with a piece of soap shaped like a turtle, I walked into the kitchen. My cheeks were red.
“What's for dinner?”
“Lamb,” said my father from the floor. With some satisfaction he added, “But you don't eat meat.”
“I do tonight, Dad,” I said as I paused to glance at my grandmother's linen shrouded body in the neon glow of the television. “Lamb will be just fine.”
“Your father told me you're going to court tomorrow, dear. Is that true? Oh, dear. When are you going to shave that...beard? How was your fun little trip? Hasn't your father suffered enough?”
True to form, the old bag of bones asked three or four unrelated questions at once followed by a rhetorical attack. If there is a hell, and I most certainly will find out, my grandmother will greet me with a plate of cookies and a list of requests to be fulfilled before I can have one. The first request will be to rub her feet. I'll lift the blankets and find that she does not have feet. She has no legs.
“I can't do it,” I'll say. “You don't have any feet.”
“Then no cookie for you.”
On and on like that forever. Hell. But what can one do in these positions except punch the clock and put in your 9 to 5?
“It's nothing, Grandma. I'll shave when I feel like it. The trip was a great success. Who knows how much more my father can suffer? He'll find out, I'm sure. Would you mind blowing that smoke in the other direction. Maybe you can give the dresser emphysema instead of me.”
She blew the smoke in generally a perpendicular direction from me, over her splayed out legs on the fold-a-bed mattress where she had spent the last five years accepting visitors and abusing them. She pretended that the slight change in body position hurt her in some way. She groaned, made a pained face, went through the whole refugee act. When she recovered she went on.
“Well, when your father was your age he had better manners than you...but why would you care? You only care about yourself.”
“No kidding?”
“You've probably ruined that violin I gave you for Christmas. So sad. No doubt it has been abused and now lays under your bed covered with newspaper.”
She really laid into her sigh this time.
“Actually, I'm a bootblack now so it helps when I don't have any shoes to shine. I play it a little and people throw me quarters. I'll make five dollars a day in the summer,” I said with a smile. “I'll be able to pay off my shine box in two or three years at that rate,”
I looked into the kitchen where my 90 year-old grandfather was trying to direct my 55 year-old father as he took out the trash.
“Tie it! No! Do it!”
The words weren't coming to him.
“I can do it, Dad. Look. I can do it. Do you want to do it?”
“God damn it!”
“Then let me do it.”
My grandmother was crying when I turned my head back toward her.
“What have I ever done to you? Why aren't you ever nice to me.”
“Aw, Christ. Fine, blow your smoke in my face. It isn't like you haven't before.”
She started to cough and cry at the same time. It appeared she was forcing herself to cough, almost willing herself to die so I would be to blame. I'm telling you, the first thing I hear in hell will be, “How did you like that sweater I knitted for you? Why don't you wear it?”
From the other room: “God damn it!”
“I can do it. Daddy! I can do it.”
“Tissue!”
I handed my grandmother a box of tissues. My jaws were bulging. I sighed deeply, then laughed weakly as I remembered Lacy throwing an apple at me in Poncho before tossing Word Up out the window. What was in store for my shine box next?
My grandmother took two tissues and blew her nose loudly before she deposited the dirty tissues in the area between her legs. She was watching a soap opera. An overdressed woman was telling an older woman with leathery skin that she just couldn't take it anymore. Take what, I don't know. Maybe money for her acting. I stared at the younger woman's prominently displayed cleavage. My grandmother changed the channel to a cooking show. I was not thinking, “This sucks!” I was thinking, “Why did I think it would be better this time?”
“I've been hard on you because I love you. I loved both of you and now think of what has happened to poor Brooklyn. I can't take it.”
Did she realize that she had just repeated the woman on the soap opera's lines? She didn't appear to be listening to the television. She turned a rheumy eye to Brooklyn's Army photo. An American flag was folded and framed above it.
Said I, “Nothing has happened to Brooklyn.”
“Your poor brother tried so hard to do the right thing. Now he's gone.”
“Brooklyn is in Virginia. He isn't dead. We just talked to him at Christmas.”
From the kitchen: “Shit! Shit Shit Shit!”
“See! There! Tie it! God damn it!”
The trash bag had broken and my father's stress level was going up like a Jim Rice home run. Garbage fell onto the warped floor. Was my role here to keep Grandma entertained while my father did the household chores so his own father could demean and harass him? Was it any wonder I turned out the way I did?
The woman on the television was demonstrating a “blend technique” for three eggs and six ounces shredded lamb and half a cup of chopped onions. It was for some sort of quiche.
“How long will you be in jail for? You know that you'll have to eat meat in jail.”
She added this part about the meat almost gleefully, like it made her day to know my principles would be broken.
“Come on. It is a small claims court. Some one is blaming me because they couldn't drive. I'm not going to jail. I'm not even going to lose the case. Dewey promised.”
“I always hoped you'd be in a courtroom, but not as a defendant. I hoped...”
She started to cough and cry. The velvet throne act.
“I have a lawyer you can call. Maybe Brooklyn knows someone. He's in the Army.”
“Brooklyn? What are you talking about? One second you talk about him like he's dead and then you want me to call him for advice about a lawyer? There won't be a need for a lawyer. I've studied law.”
The cook on television presented a completed omelet for the audience.
“Grill the omelet for three minutes in browned butter and just a touch of garlic powder and look!”
The studio audience clapped, but I was squinting to see the cook's breasts under her apron. There was nothing there. Not even a shadow of a bump. She'd probably had both removed from cancer and this pitiful show was a way to help her recover. I could almost see where her wig was taped on her balding, liver spotted head. It felt good to be mean, but only for a second. Then I felt bad. I looked at the clock above the television. I had only been in the house for half an hour. In Hell there would be a clock just like the one above the television.
“No need? You said there wasn't a need to go to a doctor when your poor foot was hurt. Remember that? Remember when you said there was no need to apply to other colleges because you were going to stay in Alaska and you only stayed there one semester? You poor boy. You poor, poor boy. You've suffered so much and now this. First your parents divorce and leave you and poor Brooklyn all alone. Then your dream of being a baseball player is taken away. How do you and Brooklyn survive? You poor things. You poor, poor boys. You've traveled so much. Why can't you settle down? Your father told me you drove around the country. Is that your idea of conserving resources? You used to care so much about the earth.”
Her lungs rattled wetly like Mack's in the spring of 1984.
“What do you want me to do, Grandma? Tell me how to fix my life. Just tell me. I'll do it. You're the one on the velvet throne, not me. I'm just a bootblack.”
“Oh, I've lived one life already. I don't have the strength to live another.”
See? The cookie. Rub the feet. No feet. No cookie. I can't win, I'm telling you.
To avoid paying attention to grandma I developed a drama for the balding, dying woman who cooked on television. Once she was under my control, I gave her children and then took the youngest one away in a bike accident. Maybe the garbage truck ran over him when he was trying to surprise her on mother's day by taking the trash out. What a good little mother's helper. I liked that because it had both drama and sentimentality. It tugged at the emotions of the weak, was very Stephen King, very Hollywood, but it lacked sex so I decided that she and her husband were making love at the time they heard the trash-men's screams for help. Neither had reached orgasm yet. Ha! Then I decided that instead of her husband (that was too predictable) she would be making love to her husband's best friend. Yes! The husband had already gone to work for the day and her secret lover had come calling and they were having sex and little Roddy or Frank Jr. or Benjamin Jr. goes out to take the trash to the curb and gets run over. Yes! On Mother's Day. Then I realized that the affair with her husbands best friend wasn't erotic enough. So I decided she was having an affair with her husband's female secretary. She as a lesbian. That was it! She wanted a recipe? I'll give her a recipe. I'll give her a recipe for misery. First a double mastectomy and then the youngest kid, Benjamin Jr., killed, crushed by a garbage truck during the last weeks of the Chemotherapy. Oh, how tragic. Boo, hoo! The reviews would read “Gripping Tragedy. Heartrending. Gritty Human Drama. Chilling. The best film of the year.” The husband fake a depression so he would not feel guilty divorcing the withered woman. The passion was gone and the marriage counselor wasn't helping. Then I decided that the marriage counselor, and not the secretary, was the woman who had been sleeping with the wife. That kept the plot simple enough for your Joe addicted to Prozac and Nascar.
My mouth watered at the thought of so much pain experienced by other people. Perfect Schadenfreude. Wasn't that what movies, books, and art provided: The chance to watch another's misery unfold and laugh at them? You experience no guilt because it isn't really happening, at least not to you. You almost want them to stumble deeper into sadness and despair. Why not? It's just fiction. Stephen King recognizes this need, this hunger to witness another's misfortune, and pumps out books to meet the demand. He knows that characters need to have their dreams taken away and then dangled in front of them and just out of reach.
I imagined a photo of Benjamin on the refrigerator next to his ugly, disjunct crayon pictures of mom and dad holding hands. Then, because it was my invention, I burned all his pictures and tiny clothes while his mother drank whiskey. Her lover had committed suicide (her own guilt ghosts) and her husband never called. Too bad. But she miraculously recovers and starts a cooking show for daytime television addicts on Channel 65. I could see her hands shaking as she turned on a blender to make a power drink for the “woman on the go.” I knew where she would go right after the director yelled cut. She would run back to the dressing room and suck down whiskey and pain killers and stare at her ugly self--her wig on the bare countertop--in the mirror and almost hear Benjamin calling, “Momma, momma! Look what I did. I took out the trash.” She would find the dress she first wore on her first rendezvous with her lover, but she doesn't fit in it anymore because the chest sags for lack of breasts. Schadenfreude
“...town. No one else ever knew. I cried all day.”
My grandmother was finishing some allegory intended to humiliate me, I was sure. I nodded as though I gave a flying Grace Jones what she was saying.
“All day long,” She repeated for emphasis. Her cigarette had gone out or maybe she was trying to light a new one, but she could not light the match with her frail hands. She tried again, holding her breath and raising her arms and trying to scrape the match across the packet. Another failure that gave me some pleasure though I felt at some level she was doing this for my benefit or maybe as punishment. Remember the cookie in hell? The two, benefit and punishment, blended together like the fruit and wheat germ the chemo lady was putting into a blender. Finally, my G. mother held them out to me with an Annie Orphan sigh. I took the match and the match book in my hands. She leaned half an inch in my direction by pivoting on her pillow.
“Do you know how many calories this has? Guess. 400? No. 300? Lower. Not even 150. 110 calories per serving. Isn't that great? Something to get you going in the morning that is healthy and fresh and natural.” (Applause)
I leaned close enough to smell the mixture of nicotine, vodka and death that was my grandmother's breath. I examined her decaying skin. It had the texture and color of a well-used leather football. I had an urge to tear it off her and expose the real person under it. I imagined that she would survive being skinned alive and her skull would lie there sucking in the cigarette while the smoke filtered between her vertebrae. I looked at her dying image and thought. Will you die?
Maybe I had been whispering the words because she rolled her skull in my direction, wearily, like a woman who doesn't want to have sex but is giving in. Her thin hair allowed me to see the contours of her skull, the dents and curves. Her lips worked the cigarette. My hate for her eclipsed into a realization of something that my father must have long ago understood. Her evil was that she made me evil. What more can a deposed ruler do? My wishing her dead was her ultimate victory because it exposed the egg shell thin nature of my peaceful convictions. It was just like The Empire Strikes Back.
She lifted one of her thin lips, lips I could not imagine kissing from anything more than pity, and the cigarette fell from them. I picked it up from the gray sheets and placed it gently back in her mouth. She blinked and her lips curled in contempt. I struck two matches at the same time to be sure they would light and stay lit. The sulfur fumes split the smell of perfume and the skin lotion (Cow udder cream) she used. I leaned into the plume, inches from her mouth, and sensuously raised the lit matches to the cigarette. The tip of the cigarette caught on fire and glowed as she sucked on it. She pulled the smoke as deep as it would go into her shriveled lungs and then blew it out toward my face. It parted, strong and warm over the bridge of my nose. Her tongue emerged from her mouth, a pink bulb, and she licked her dry lips. I tossed the matches in an ashtray.
When she turned back to the television I got up and walked to the bathroom and tore my pants down and looked at my face in the mirror. I looked both surprised and guilty. My guilt faded into cunning relief as I cheated death again. There was no cookie. There were no feet. I pulled my pants up. After washing my hands with a piece of soap shaped like a turtle, I walked into the kitchen. My cheeks were red.
“What's for dinner?”
“Lamb,” said my father from the floor. With some satisfaction he added, “But you don't eat meat.”
“I do tonight, Dad,” I said as I paused to glance at my grandmother's linen shrouded body in the neon glow of the television. “Lamb will be just fine.”
posted by Oggy Bleacher | 11:00 PM
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