Fight Night, page 3
After dinner, me and Grandma helped Mom with her lines which made Mom laugh so hard she peed a small amount, a teaspoonful. Grandma drank two glasses of William’s homemade plonk. I was nervous that it would make her start talking about the doctors killing everyone but it just made her dramatic. When she read Jack’s lines she stood up from the table while Mom was laughing her head off to say: “I kiss you, but it’s as though my kisses hurtle off a cliff. You take off your clothes, but you’re not naked. What can we do, then? What will happen?”
Then Grandma said, Oh that reminds me, that reminds me! She had another story of epic nudity. One Christmas centuries ago Grandma was young and squatting on the sixth floor of an auto parts warehouse in West Berlin that was right beside the Wall. You know the Wall, Swiv, the Wall! (No, I don’t.) And she looked out the window into East Berlin and saw a young German soldier all by himself marching around with this giant coat that was too big for him and his giant rifle dangling awkwardly off his little shoulder. Grandma watched him for a while until she could get his attention and then she waved and he waved back and smiled and stopped marching. Grandma breathed on the glass and wrote Fröhilche Weihnachten in the steam backwards for the soldier to read and then the soldier hastily spelled out a message of his own to Grandma in the snow which was Ich bin ein Gefangener des Staates and then she slowly took off all her clothes while he stood there by himself in the dusky square with light snow falling and all his heavy artillery and coat and little shoulders. When she was totally naked she curtsied, and then the soldier blew her kisses and clapped and they waved goodbye. Mom said, Oh my god, that is INSANE! I thought so too but not in the way the two of them thought it was but in the way you go to a locked-up hospital with guards. Well, I was young, said Grandma. I’m young and I don’t do that, I said. Not yet, said Grandma. It’s a memory now. I wonder if the soldier remembers that night. Mom got up and hugged Grandma. I’m sure he does, she said.
2.
This morning the curtain to Mom’s bedroom, which is really a living room, which is why there isn’t a normal door, was torn off the curtain rod. The curtain rod was torn off the wall, the remote control was smashed and the battery was gone, the hairbrush handle was broken from being thrown at the cutlery thing in the kitchen, the cutlery thing in the kitchen was chipped from having the hairbrush thrown at it and the necklace that you gave her with our initials on it was ripped into a million pieces which in addition to hearing aid batteries, Grandma’s pills, Amish farm puzzle pieces and conchigliettes I now have to crawl around and pick up. It’s a good thing I can’t go to school anymore so I have all day for picking up everybody’s shit.
Before Mom went to rehearsal she grabbed me and pinned my head to her rib cage. I couldn’t escape. She said I’m sorry! I’m sorry! It was about her rampage. I made a joke but she wanted me to take it all seriously. It was too disturbing to take seriously. You’re up the stump, Mom, I said, you’re on an emotional rollercoaster! Were you talking to dad? I asked. Something like that, she said. Something like dad or something like talking, I said. She said, Something like all of that.
Mom told me and Grandma that she was going to a Russian spa and teahouse with someone in the cast after rehearsal today where she would be whipped with branches to get her blood flowing. Jack? I said. No, not Jack, she said. Jack is a character, Swiv! Be careful, Gord, I said silently. Mom said she wouldn’t sit in the hot tub because of Gord. Grandma said it was funny that a hundred years ago we—which doesn’t mean we—had narrowly escaped getting whipped and murdered by Russians and now Mom was voluntarily paying big bucks to get whipped and murdered by Russians. But she gets tea afterwards, I said. Mom said she’d prefer hot vodka although not this time because of Gord, who gets blamed for preventing Mom from doing every fun thing in life. Don’t smoke! I yelled at her. Then Mom opened the door and said what the hell is this? Grandma and I yelled RAIN at the same time. Mom stomped around looking for an umbrella that wasn’t broke to shit and Grandma called out, Bye! See you in the funny papers!
Today Grandma is feeling dizzy when she bends over. So don’t bend over! I said. She said she finally had an excellent bowel movement. It’s been six days. It’s not a record. What’s your record, Grandma? Ecuador in ’74 was a record. She asked me if I’d heard anything about the divine feminine. She said she should bring her crossword puzzle into the washroom with her more often. She couldn’t find her glasses or her address book. I held them up to her face. They were on the table in front of her. Well, of all things! I’m not with it today!
Then Grandma got talking for about one and a half hours, which took up all of Editorial Meeting, about her old life in that town of escaped Russians. She can’t believe she lived there for sixty-two years except for the few months she squatted in Berlin accidentally when she went to Germany to visit her older sister who was living in the Black Forest, which is the home of the cuckoo clock, she said. Mom should go there, I said. To the Black Forest? said Grandma. To the home of the cuckoo clock, I said. It makes me shudder! said Grandma. I was a maverick! She was talking about her town. It worked against us, she said. When she was a kid her father protected her from Willit Braun Senior, the uber-schultz of the village who was a classic tyrant, pompous, authoritarian, insecure, frustrated, self-pitying, resentful, envious, vain and vindictive, and with a mighty chip on his shoulder and dumb. Also, he embodied the fascist notion of a superior group, which he thought was us. Well, not all of us. The men among us. What a wingnut. You can write those things down, Swiv, she said. Just make a little note of that.
Well, I’m recording it, I told her. I held up my phone and she shook her head. Oh right, I always forget about your camera. Make sure it has juice. Was it a cult? I said. No, said Grandma. Well, yes, possibly. It was!
Grandma divides the people from her town into MB or EMC. She is EMC. She says the MBs think they’re the only ones going to heaven. They were also the first ones in town to sing in four-part harmony. For the EMCs that was a mortal sin until Sid Reimer’s dad brought it in to the church. And he brought a pump organ which was also a sin. He was very instrumental in moving the church forward.
When Grandma grew up, she protected herself from Willit Braun. And she protected Mom from him too, and everyone in her family, even Grandpa, who really liked that about her. He was all for it! He couldn’t fight for himself. He couldn’t do it. He would get very quiet and go for long, long walks. Very long walks. Sometimes until his feet bled. Talking about fighting and escaping reminded her of a friend of hers from that town who she and their other friend helped to escape from her violent husband. The woman’s daughter and her friends got together and hatched a plan to whisk her away to Montreal where the daughter lived in a loft apartment. But the friend felt so guilty she returned to the town and to her husband six months later. Then all the women prayed that he would die. What else could they do? And he did, eventually. It took five years. This can be today’s math class, said Grandma. If it takes five years to kill a guy with prayer, and it takes six people a day to pray, then how many prayers of pissed off women praying every day for five years does it take to pray a guy to death?
Grandma sorted her meds on the table with the edge of her credit card while she waited for my answer. Ten thousand, nine hundred and fifty prayers, I said. Whoa, she said. Am I right? I asked. Who knows, she said, I believe you!
After that I went with Grandma on the streetcar to meet her friends at the Duke of York. I went because she was dizzy and had to lean on me. Every six months the group of them get together to celebrate that they’re still living. Grandma wore her red slippers instead of shoes because her right foot was puffed up like a blowfish. That’s the leg they took the vein out of to put into her chest. Look at the way my track pants cover them up, she said. Nobody will notice I’m wearing slippers. Before we left I spent twenty-five minutes helping her get her compression socks on. She almost went with one compression sock only because she was impatient but I forced her to let me put the other one on because it looked stupid with just one. Halfway to The Duke of York her diuretic kicked in and we had to make an emergency stop to find a bathroom. We got off the streetcar and went into the first building we saw which was the corporate headquarters of OBTRON. It had a lot of glass and shiny black furniture including the desk where the security guy was sitting. He didn’t look at us the whole time. He had a gun. He stared at all his TVs and said, I’m asking you to leave right now.
Surely there’s a washroom in this building that I could use, said Grandma.
I’m afraid not, he said, they’re not designated for public use.
She really has to go! I told him.
You don’t have to yell at me, miss, I can hear you. I told you they’re not designated for public use.
Her diuretic kicked in on the streetcar and she’ll spring a leak if you don’t let her use the fucking washroom, you fascist prick! I said.
Swiv, said Grandma. She pretended to slice her throat with her finger. The guy finally looked at us and got up and came around to the front of the desk with his hand on his gun. Grandma asked him if it was all right with him if she peed in one of those giant planters by the window. He said no, he couldn’t authorize her to do that. Do it! I told Grandma. I’m authorizing it! She said no, no, we’ll find a place. She told the security guy she was very tempted to let ’er rip right there in the lobby on that shiny floor and he said ma’am, you do not have a constitutional right to use fighting words with me. Then Grandma started talking about constitutional rights but she was huffing and puffing and also dizzy still, and sort of teetering around and it was hard for her to talk. You’re gonna have a goddamn cardiac event, Grandma, I told her. I’m telling De Sica. De Sica! said Grandma. Did he call? Don’t let this be the hill you die on! I said. Hooooooooo, said Grandma. You’re right. What a ridiculous last stand. I took Grandma’s hand and we went to the Tim Hortons next door and bought two Boston cream doughnuts so they would give us the code to the washroom.
Grandma said that I have a slight, slight, slight, slight tendency at times to go a bit overboard. You were the one who said we have to defend the most vulnerable amongst us, I told her, and that’s you! I pointed at her slippers and compression socks. You said in every sport defence is job one! Then she told me that the security guard was not the main culprit. It was the rich owners of the company he worked for. He was just doing his job the way he’d been told to do his job by not letting ladies pee wherever they wanted to in the building. Grandma said he could have broken the rules and let her use the washroom but he was too afraid of it all getting caught on tape and then losing his job and then his family starving. She said he was the most vulnerable. Then I was mad because I had only been trying to do the right thing. I walked too fast for Grandma so she couldn’t breathe. Then I felt like crying because I was mad at myself and everyone. I slowed down so Grandma wouldn’t die. She was busy trying to survive and didn’t notice that there were tears in my eyes. Fighting is so hard and yet we’re never supposed to stop!
I lay down and tried to have a nap in the booth at the Duke of York while Grandma and her friends had lunch and talked about their bodies. Wilda has blue finger syndrome and her pelvic floor has dropped. And about doctors killing everyone. And about misunderstandings and Call the Midwife and capitalism and espionage and existential angst and the royal family and Iran and bus tours versus cruises and grandchildren and cotton versus silk underwear and living wills, and even you. Do you know where he is? Wilda asked Grandma. I had my eyes closed and waited to hear the answer. Then Wilda said ah, right. Grandma must have pointed at me and shook her head, zipped her lips and thrown away the key. One of the women, Ida, asked the others if they were going the assisted dying route. She told the women that her friend in Ajax had gone the assisted dying route and her last words were ahhhh, peace. Wilda said piece of what? She was joking. One last slice of cherry cheese cake? They all laughed and then they all sighed. Grandma said oh, but isn’t that beautiful. She means it but I can tell from her voice that it also makes her sad and mad that Grandpa and Auntie Momo couldn’t go the assisted dying route. Will you go that route, Elvira? Wilda asked. Assisted dying? said Grandma. Of course she would! She had filled out all the forms the other day at Raptors halftime. It’s very straightforward, she said. Wilda said she was worried about saying goodbye to everyone before she died. How would she get around to it all when she’d be so busy with dying. Grandma said no problem. Let’s say goodbye now and get it over with! We’re friends, we love each other, we know it, we’ve had good times, and one day we’ll be dead, whether we’re assisted or not. So, goodbye! They all thought that was a good idea so they all said goodbye to each other then and got it over with. Then Grandma told them the whole story of her diuretic kicking in and the guy with the gun and they laughed and laughed. He just didn’t understand! one of them said. They just don’t understand. They just don’t understand. When the bill came they all had to stare at it and think for half an hour and then they all put the wrong amount of money in the centre of the table and Wilda had to count it over five times and yell at everyone to stop interrupting her.
On the streetcar home I counted twelve people from all walks of life who looked at Grandma’s slippers. She didn’t care. She laughed. I wanted her to pull her track pants further over them but she was sitting down so her track pants rode up instead, even revealing her compression socks and parts of her legs. She also farted on the streetcar and in between gales of laughter when she could barely breathe she whispered to me that she was really sorry for embarrassing me and that when I was a baby and we were in public places together she would say that I was the one who had farted, not her. I’ll have to teach Gord to be strong and alert. Babies are fall guys. Then Grandma fell asleep with her head on my shoulder for six stops.
Two people standing in the aisle started arguing. The lady said to the man, Listen, you have to understand your gross factor for any woman under the age of forty. The man said: You could say under thirty-five. No, really, dude, said the woman, forty. The man said she was crazy. He said she should say thirty-five. She said she wouldn’t say thirty-five, no way. They stared out the window in opposite directions.
We stopped at the Sev to get microwave popcorn for the Raptors game. The same guy was there sitting on the curb wearing Grandma’s Winnipeg Jets sweatpants. He didn’t recognize her. He asked me for change.
I have none, I said.
Robert, he said.
Sorry, I have none.
Robert.
Sorry, I have none, Robert.
* * *
Mom came home late after rehearsal and said there were cop cars on either end of our street. What did you guys do now? she asked us.
The doorbell rang. Ball Game! It was Jay Gatsby. He had seen Mom coming home. She opened the door and said fifteen million dollars. Jay Gatsby said please, can we just—
Mom said thirty million dollars cash. She slammed the door.
The doorbell rang again. Ball Game! It was the two cops from the two ends of the street. They were all smiles. They had their hands on their guns. They asked Mom if they could ask her a few questions. She said no. They asked Mom if she had seen any suspicious activity around here lately. Yours, she said. Close the door, honey, said Grandma. Mom asked the cop if she could see his gun for a sec. Honey! said Grandma. She hobbled over to the front door and said out, out, thank you, Knight Rider, and then closed it.
I made conchigliettes with cheese. We ate it watching the game. Grandma drank red wine and Mom drank water because of Buzzkill. Don’t call Gord that, I said. Mom said she was kidding, but that was a lie. I just love it when Kyle Lowry gets mad, said Grandma. Mom was silent. I don’t know why McCaw always does those fly-bys in the corners, said Grandma. Does he think he’s performing The Nutcracker? It doesn’t seem as effective a defence as when they just stand their ground. I mean get your arms up, plant your feet, right Swiv? I nodded. All they have to do is wait a second for McCaw to do his leaping and then they make their threes, said Grandma. Ridiculous! Mom didn’t say anything. Tears were on her face.
Grandma got up and sat down beside Mom and patted her leg and asked her how her day had gone. She put Mom’s feet into her lap and rubbed them. Mom said she thinks she offended her stage manager. Her stage manager had told Mom that she had no time to read books and Mom said to the stage manager you have time to watch Netflix for three hours every evening but no time to read books? After that Mom said the stage manager was just being weird. She didn’t give Mom notes on time so Mom missed a bunch of cues and looked like an idiot. I think you’re just paranoid, Mom, I said. Because of Gord and everything. Mom said pregnancy doesn’t make you paranoid. I’d be paranoid if I had a whole other completely separate person growing inside of me, I said. Well, make sure you use birth control then, she said. She has to say disgusting things. She said she’d send the stage manager a text apologizing. After that she stopped crying. She took just one sip of Grandma’s wine. Then she said Serge Ibaka is inordinately handsome. She said oh fuck off with your happiness during the Keg commercials and threw popcorn at the TV which I picked up and threw into the air and caught in my mouth every time. Then she started getting worried again because the stage manager wasn’t texting back to say it was okay. Grandma said don’t worry, honey, she’s probably just busy watching her Netflix.
