Fight Night, page 4
3.
Last night I slept with Mom. Gord was tucked right in between us. Mom slept with her hand on her chin like she was thinking all night long.
On her way to rehearsal this morning Mom told me not to forget to let the rat guy in.
Grandma is watching her shows on rotation. She watches the same episodes of Call the Midwife and Midsomer Murders and Miss Fisher two or three times because she always falls asleep during them, even with all the screaming and killing, and she thinks it’s unlikely that she would fall asleep at the same place in the show twice so every time she watches she’s picking up new clues and information. Poor Grandma. Today she has the Triple Scoop Sundae. Gout, trigeminal neuralgia, angina. With a topping of arthritis. I was clipping her toenails and trying to straighten out her toes. Her tree roots, she calls them. Ho! she said. Are you kidding me? It’s only pain. We don’t worry about pain. It’s not life-threatening. It is not those who can inflict the most but those who can suffer the most who will conquer, she said. If you say so, I said. That’s an Irish guy, a soldier of the republic who said that, she told me. Do you know his name? I asked. Is it Cipher? Terence MacSwiney, she said. Have you heard of the 1916 Easter Rising? Obviously not, I said. You mean Jesus? I was serious. She began to laugh but it turned into a cough. I had to stop clipping and she had to use her nitro spray three times which is the maximum number of times before you call 911 or basically die.
Ball Game! It was the rat guy. He said Mom had called him because she’d seen a rat. Grandma said she was the one who’d seen a rat. This big, she said. She held out her hands. Long tail. Black. It ran out of the foyer and then behind the piano and then went flying over there behind the china cabinet and then around into the kitchen and down the basement stairs. Hmmm, said the rat guy. It wasn’t a mouse? Grandma said it was definitely not a mouse. She shuffled back to her bedroom with her walker and left me alone with the rat guy. He looked all over the house and said he didn’t see any rat signs. He threw some rat poison in the crawlspace in the basement. He wanted to show me what he was doing but I didn’t want to get anywhere near that crawlspace and I stayed upstairs. Then he sat down at the dining room table with me and started filling out his report and invoice. He spoke very quietly. He said animals, even rats, are just trying to take care of their babies and survive. He said divorce just breaks you down and then you have to re-invent yourself. I nodded. He said he communes with every animal. When he went to Mexico with his wife, pelicans landed on his head. Dogs protect him in strange houses when he’s fighting pests. Seagulls follow him around. He searches for inner peace and balance. He told me I had to get in touch with my inner being. I thought about Gord. I didn’t want to have an inner being. He told me he has affinity with all animals, even rats, even ants and moths. He left a bill for one hundred and sixty dollars and said to call him if Grandma sees the rat again. He winked.
I gave Grandma the bill and told her the rat guy had winked and that made her mad. He thinks she doesn’t know what a rat looks like? She said not to tell Mom about the rat or the bill because she’d say it was Grandma’s medication making her bonkers. Your mom wants me to use essential oils, she said. Have you heard of them? Of course not. They’re not real. The rat is real. Essential oils, my foot.
* * *
Mom came home early from rehearsals. She said she was so exhausted and also the stage manager was still being weird, and meanwhile the director had said it might be a liability to have Mom in the play. Also, he said that they might cancel the play altogether because the government was threatening to cut their funding if they kept producing Antifa plays. She went to her room and slammed the door shut.
Grandma and I sat at the dining room table. Grandma was thinking. She crossed her arms and rested them on top of her giant boobs which is like a shelf the size of my mini-Casio. She has so many brown splotches on her arms. It looks like they’re joining together to create a whole new skin. She made her face go small. Onward to battle. She dropped her hearing aid batteries on the floor but she didn’t notice. When I was crawling around looking for them she told me that she had a friend named Emiliano Zapata who said it was better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. I said very funny and she patted me on my head and said I was a good kid.
All right, school at home, said Grandma. First, the Sudoku. I’ll time you. Have you had a BM? I didn’t answer. She said if you bring forth what is within you it will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you. That’s the gospel of Thomas. She laughed so hard I was one second away from having to Heimlich her. Yes, I said. I did, Grandma, okay? Stop choking! I had a BM! I was trying to save her life. She said okay, good. Begin! There were little bubbles of spit at the corners of her mouth. She wiped them off and said hooooooo. Sudoku was the first class of the day. Actually, the first class was Poached Egg. Grandma showed me a blood egg. She threw it away and used a different one that didn’t have blood in it. After the egg there was Sudoku and Grandma taught me some Latin medical terms. Then we analyzed our dreams. I told her my dream of trampolines being everywhere outside, all connected, so we can bounce to work, to school, to rehearsal, everywhere. Grandma’s face got smaller as she thought. Her forehead was puckered. Well, what do you think that means, Swiv?
How the hell should I know? I told her. I just dream ’em.
Grandma and I played catch sitting down. She has a special rubber ball with little spikes on it. She also has a rubber elastic thing that she’s supposed to exercise her hands with by stretching it out, but she threw it into her laundry basket with her breathing machine. She hates it. She sawed a whodunnit into three parts with a bread knife because it’s easier to hold like that when her arthritis is bad. That was one Math Class—for me to make all the parts of her sawed-up book have the same number of pages. Don’t tell Mom, she said. Grandma had already sawed Mom’s The Anatomy of Melancholy into six parts because it was huge—that was seventy-two pages for each part not including all the pages of notes at the end which she didn’t want. She hid the parts in her laundry basket so Mom wouldn’t find out. Grandma hopes that Mom never remembers that she had that book in the first place or goes looking for it, but even if she did she wouldn’t find it because I do Grandma’s laundry. Better not be reading one of the sections when Mom’s around, I told her. Grandma and I re-enacted what that would be. I played the role of Mom. Hey, I said. Is that one-sixth of my Anatomy of Melancholy? Nooooo, said Grandma. It’s a leaflet from the hospital. No! I said. You chopped up my Anatomy of Melancholy! How could you? It was easy, said Grandma. I used the bread knife. Seriously, Grandma, I said, you better not let her see you reading it. I’m not gonna read a book called The Anatomy of Melancholy, said Grandma, you’ve gotta be kidding me!
Math Class was also about figuring out when Grandma and I would meet on the height chart that we wrote on the door between the kitchen and the dining room. If I’m 5′1″ now, said Grandma, and you’re 4′5″, and if you’re growing at the rate of two and a half inches per year and I’m shrinking at the rate of one quarter of an inch per year, then when do we meet on the chart? Three years and four months, I said. Could be! said Grandma. Who knows, we’ll find out! In real school you’d know if I was right or not, I told her. It’s inexact, she said. This is actually a lesson in patience, not math, because we’ll have to wait to find out. We’ll keep checking! We need things to look forward to. Would you like to wear my clothes when we’re the same size? Oh, look at the expression of horror on your face! You don’t like my snazzy track suit? It’s velour! Hahahahaha. Fun and games!
Next class was Boggle. First Real Boggle and then Fake Boggle which is when we make our own words from the letters, words that aren’t real words, and we tell each other what they mean in under a minute. Grandma writes them all down. She told me what a cipher key was. Then we had Fast Cooking. We made Survival Casserole and 1-2-3-4 Cake in sixteen minutes, which was a record. Grandma recorded it, which for her means writing it down on paper. Grandma likes to do everything fast. When she wants to leave and Mom and I aren’t ready she yells, Bus is loading in lane seven! Mom gets so mad when Grandma takes off down the sidewalk before Mom can get her shoes on to help her. Once, in the middle of a blizzard, Grandma was adamant about going to her book club because they were doing Euripides who is a peer of Grandma’s. She said they’re the same age and shared a desk at school. Back then she was 5′7 and Euripides was jealous of her. She had to help him with everything because he was a dreamer. She took off to book club before me or Mom could catch her. We waited at home steaming mad because it was a very serious blizzard and Grandma was a fucking nutbar for going out in that weather. She came back hours and hours later like fucking Achilles returning from Troy. Mom was so mad she didn’t help Grandma off with her winter boots. Grandma was triumphant. Her face was all red and she was covered in snow. She told us she got to the streetcar stop on the icy streets by throwing down her woolen hat for traction and stepping on it and then picking it up and throwing it down again, stepping on it, and so on and so on until she got to the stop and then she told some very handsome guys standing there to push her onto the streetcar and there you go, she made it to Euripides. How did you get back? I asked her. Mom was already off slamming things around in another room. She didn’t want to hear how Grandma got back. I just did it the same way! said Grandma. I have not been in the company of so many handsome men in quite some time! Unless you count that last ambulance ride. They just love to help me! We got you, they say. You’re good. We got you. Isn’t that wonderful?
Next class was Ancient History (Made Modern). Grandma told me that when she was born her mother was so sick and tired she thought she was going to die, so she left the hospital and went home, what else could she do? She left Grandma in the hospital to be taken care of by the nurses. That’s why Grandma wanted to become a nurse later. They loved Grandma and fought over who got to hold her. Grandma’s mom had fourteen other kids at home to take care of so she got well again and then sent for Grandma. When Grandma turned eight her dad gave her a job. When the house started filling up with smoke she had to run downstairs and shovel coal. She slept in the hallway and had a good vantage point for detecting the smoke. When she was eight her parents had taken her out of their bed and put her in a crib in that hallway because she was small for her age and because they had run out of beds and bedrooms. Grandma was nimble enough to leap right out of the crib at the first hint of smoke. The rest of the family could slumber on obliviously while little Grandma shovelled the coal and saved them all from suffocating in their sleep. Her parents loved her very much. Her father was a rogue who became a rich lumberman and her mother was pious and had been a thirteen-year-old maid in the city and was stood up at the altar twice by Grandma’s dad because he liked being in the bush with the men and didn’t know if he was ready to settle down and have fifteen children with a poor maid. He’d really wanted to marry a different lady but that lady’s brothers said no way, she couldn’t marry that wild lumberjack. Then that other woman had an accident and became a different person. Grandma’s father built their house with the strongest wood, oak, to prevent Grandma’s older brothers from destroying it with their roughhousing. They literally swung from the rafters and threw themselves down staircases and slammed their bodies against the walls all the time. They lived in the town on the main street next to the lumberyard. When Grandma went to play with her friends who lived on farms they teased her for not knowing how to extract fluids from animals or kill them. One of them forced Grandma to cut the head off a chicken. Then they ate that chicken for dinner and chased Grandma home, waving the chicken’s feet and head at her. Grandma turned around on the gravel road and told them all to go to hell, that was no way to treat a guest. When she got home she was in trouble with Willit Braun for telling the farm kids to go to hell but her father told Willit Braun to stop being a hypocrite. Kids will be kids. Get down from your pulpit. Grandma’s dad shooed Willit Braun off the porch and gave Grandma a Cuban Lunch chocolate bar he’d bought in the city. Every time he came back from the city he had a Cuban Lunch for her. And one time a mug that said Fino alla fine.
When Grandma’s dad died, her brothers took over everything and left the sisters in the dirt. They even stole the house that was supposed to go to the girls. They made all the workers in the factory pray together every ninety minutes and promise God they wouldn’t form a union. Grandma was fifteen years old. Her brothers sent her away to Omaha, Nebraska to study the Bible and work as a live-in maid for an American family. They wanted her to find a husband or become a missionary so she’d be taken care of by someone other than them. That’s patriarchy, Swiv, make a note. I waved my phone at her.
One time, Grandma’s brother’s wife felt very guilty about randomly having married into all the family money while the legitimate heirs, Grandma and her sisters, had none of the family money, so she wrote Grandma a cheque for twenty thousand dollars. Grandma beat a fast track to the bank to cash it before her nephew could put a stop payment on the cheque. Later he told Grandma that his mom, her brother’s wife, was not in her right mind when she gave Grandma that cheque. Whenever she was feeling generous her family called her crazy. Grandma used the money to pay off a bunch of loans and to buy a screen door so she could feel the evening breeze without getting eaten alive by mosquitoes after schlepping around all day in the blazing hot prairie sun. All her life she had wanted a screen door. A few years before that she had asked her nephews for a screen door, at cost, from the family business, but her nephews said no, that was impossible because if they gave Grandma a screen door, at cost, they’d have to give all their aunts a screen door, at cost, and where would that all end? Also, the nephews said they made high-end products and that probably wouldn’t be suitable for Grandma. What on earth does that mean? Grandma asked me.
Grandma was on her Gazelle as she was talking about this. I have a mental image, she said. She told me about one day when she was young and she was walking down the street. She was freezing to death. It was thirty below. The wind was blowing hard. Nobody else was outside. This was in her town. She doesn’t know why she was walking around outside when it was so cold and the wind was blowing so hard. I asked her if she’d been sad. She was still huffing and puffing on her Gazelle. She said maybe, maybe not. Maybe she’d been sent on an errand that day. She was walking and freezing. She was mad, she remembered suddenly. She was mad, not sad. There was no errand. Then she saw three people walking towards her in the swirling snow. They had to get close to her before she could really see them. They were an old grandma and her two grandsons. The old grandma had a lit cigarette sticking straight out of her mouth. It wasn’t dangling. The little boys were wearing one mitten each. They held popsicles in their other hands, the ones without mittens on them. They were licking their popsicles. And they were all happy. They were all smiling. It was minus thirty degrees. The wind was howling. It was a prairie blizzard. Nobody was around. Grandma got close to them on the sidewalk. The old grandma said to Grandma, who was young then and not a grandma, Not too bad out, eh? Her cigarette stuck straight out of her mouth even when she talked.
I asked Grandma why she’d had that memory right now. Not too bad out, eh? said Grandma. She said she often had that memory. It was just a regular flash.
* * *
Mom came out of her room, crying. She went into Grandma’s bedroom with Grandma and they shut the door. I put water on to boil for the conchigliettes. Then Mom came out of the bedroom and asked me if I wanted to go to the card shop with her and pick out a notebook for me and a card for the stage manager to say she was sorry for the Netflix thing. Grandma came shuffling along behind her and said she’d finish making dinner.
Mom blew another gasket at the card shop. I already knew she was mad because she called the innocent squirrels on the deck assholes. Fuck off, jerks! They had to kamikaze off the railing into the neighbour’s yard to escape from Mom. Wallenda Brothers, said Mom. They’re just squirrels, I said. Mom doesn’t care what they are. They’re mocking little vengeful creeps. They cause fires. We waited in a line-up at the cash register for twenty minutes which Mom spent writing her message in the card. When we finally got to the checkout to pay, Mom used the surface of the counter to quickly address the envelope and the shop owner guy with the gleaming incisors who was standing behind the counter asked me and Mom to please move away from the counter so that he could help ring out the other customers. Mom said she was just addressing the envelope, it would take her five seconds and then he could go on facilitating capitalism. The shop owner said they liked to encourage their customers to take the cards home and then to take their time to do something creative with them. Then Mom really started to take her time addressing and licking the envelope and sticking a stamp on it. When she was finished she looked around and said the only creative thing she could see in that pale, tasteful little shop was the markup on the cheesy inventory they carried and maybe he should create a space where paying customers feel welcome to address their envelopes, the ones purchased at a creative markup price from the store itself, and not expect people to buy a goddamn card and envelope, go home, read The Artist’s Way, get inspired, be creative with a cute message, go back out, find a goddamn mailbox that hasn’t been knocked over by meth-heads, drop the thing in the slot, slip three times on the ice, break your tailbone and go home again to find cops waiting in every fucking corner and watching your every fucking move through the fucking modern thermostats. The shop owner said that was an incredibly interesting idea, he’d consider it, but for now he had customers to take care of. Mom said that when the shop owner opened his mouth it was like when that kid in Close Encounters of the Third Kind opens the door to the aliens and is almost blinded.
