The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted (8 page)

They sit up very straight and still. Janey takes small bites, so that the pie lasts longer, so that it seems like there is more. She has heard you should chew at least seventeen times, but if you do that, all you’re doing is chewing spit.

Janey has observed that she chews mostly four times and usually begins swallowing at three and a half.

When Janey has finished her pie, she checks the rearview to see if her father is watching. As he is not, she licks the plate. She considers asking if she can have more.

No. She’ll ask later. When they stop for gas. She throws her dirty dishes in the trash bag her mother has put on the floor of the backseat. Janey’s thirsty now, but to make up for asking for more pie later, she won’t ask for a drink now.

She stretches out along the backseat and closes her eyes and thinks of her grandfather, called Bampo, from the first grandchild’s mispronunciation. She’d never tell her parents, but she loves him more than she loves them. He wears cardigan sweaters and suspenders. He makes gravy beyond compare, and he gives Janey mashed potato and gravy sandwiches and eats one right along with her so that she doesn’t look stupid. He slides his lower denture plate out with his tongue, then bites it back in like a snapping turtle. (When he first showed Janey this, she didn’t know his teeth were false, and she thought he was an awfully talented man.)

When Bampo greets you, he shakes your hand really fast in a way that undulates your whole arm and says,

“Howdohowdohowdo!” until you are helpless with laughter. You always laugh around Bampo, he makes everybody laugh. He talks to strangers and they talk back to him. He
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is the star of the whole extended family. Janey thinks sometimes it must be hard for her grandmother, but her grandmother is a good sport about it. She has her role. She stands in front of Bampo to be the first to welcome those who come to visit. She answers the phone and she makes the coffee and toast in the morning. She cleans the bird-cage and vacuums the rugs, she decorates the bathroom with fluffy pink toilet tank covers and toilet seat covers and rugs. There are also pink ruffled curtains, and a doll wearing a pink crocheted hat and a wide skirt that hides the extra toilet paper. The doll has a pink parasol, which Janey longs for, though she has no idea why—what would she do with such a thing? Her grandmother is the only one allowed to touch the porcelain poodles on the end table, a white poodle dog and two puppies, all linked together with fine gold chain. She sits at the kitchen table with her daughters and talks to them about how to manage husbands and children, and sometimes she reads their fortunes in tea leaves, oh, she can be vibrant in her usefulness.

But Bampo is the star, and he loves Janey the best of all his grandchildren. He lets her sit on his lap no matter what, even if he’s listening to baseball on his transistor radio; he loves his baseball and will not suffer interruptions during a game. Janey does not love baseball except when she’s with him. Then, she listens to the game, too.

She likes when the announcer says, “Annnnd it’s three and two, full count.” Janey likes a full count, because then something is forced to happen—the guy’s safe or he’s not.

There are other reasons Janey knows she’s her grandfather’s favorite. If she gets a cut or a scrape, he’s the one to put on a Band-Aid. If she’s dizzy after a ride at the state fair, he’ll sit things out with her on a bench with his arm around her for as long as it takes. Once, he burned a tick off 60

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d her head with a lighted cigarette. He put the cigarette to the tick’s butt, and the thing backed right out. When she drives somewhere with him, he lets her turn the steering wheel. He sent her a bottle of Friendship Garden perfume for her tenth birthday, when no one else thought to give her perfume, which she loves. He knows her secret, and keeps it.

Janey often has night terrors, where she wakes up from a sound sleep with her heart racing and her breathing all but impossible. The idea of her own death seems to assume wretched form, and it sits on her chest, pries open her eyes, and mashes foreheads with her. The walls close in and the ceiling lowers. Darkness deepens. She does not hear but feels the words:

you will be no more.

Sometimes it lasts only a minute or so, and she falls back asleep. Other times, it lasts longer. When it used to happen, she would cry and whisper, “Please.” But last time her family came to North Dakota, Janey and her grandfather were for some reason alone in his house, and she told him about it. She said, “Sometimes I wake up at night, and I’m so scared of dying.” She laughed a little, embarrassed.

Bampo said, “Oh, that’s an awful thing. What do you do about it?”

“Nothing.” She swallowed hugely.

“You don’t tell your parents?”

“I can’t.” She looked down. “I don’t want to.”

She expected that he would argue against this, tell her she should awaken them so that they might comfort her.

But he didn’t say that. Instead, he said, “Well, next time it happens, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to go
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very quietly into the kitchen and turn on the light and sit at the table and eat an orange. Will you do that for me?”

She nodded solemnly. She thought it could work. She could see herself at the kitchen table in her pajamas, swinging her legs, peeling an orange, the scent rising up for the cure. She could hear the low hum of the overhead light burning steady and bright, chasing away the shadows and illuminating the cheerful Mixmaster, the long line of her mother’s cookbooks on the counter.

And indeed Bampo’s suggestion did work. When Janey awakens now with that particular kind of panic, she goes each time to the kitchen and turns on a light. Once they were out of oranges, but an apple did the trick. It wasn’t the fruit anyway, Janey had decided. It was the getting up.

So, yes, her grandfather treasures her: she holds it in the teacup of her heart. But there are other good things in North Dakota. Janey has cousins there whom she really likes; they are like brothers and sisters. Her parents always stay with her grandparents, and Janey stays with Aunt Peggy and Uncle Jim. They have five children, three boys and two girls—her parents’ siblings all have large families, her family is an anomaly; she doesn’t know why.

Janey spends time with the girl cousins who are her age, but she also spends time with the boys, and she prefers this, it seems a privilege; boys do not otherwise seem to like her. They seem, in fact, to like her less and less. Boys and girls from her school go roller-skating together and then to Boogie’s for hamburgers, or they meet at the movies, and sit together. But then they just go their separate ways right afterward, and their eyes seem empty of the near memory of one another, so Janey doesn’t think she’s missing all that much. She believes she’ll catch up soon. She hopes so.

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t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d Janey especially likes her cousin Michael, Aunt Peggy and Uncle Jim’s oldest, and her cousin Richie, who is the oldest of Aunt Ruth and Uncle Henry, who live nearby.

Michael is a year older than she, and Richie only three months older, and they both greatly admire the way she can draw. Last time they wanted tanks and airplanes, in-fantrymen dead on the ground, bullets flying. This time she suspects they’ll want spaceships or beautiful women, amply endowed—this is what the boys in her art class ask her to draw. She can do either.

Her parents will probably deliver Janey to her aunt and uncle late at night, they usually do, and Janey thinks how Aunt Peggy will show her to a bed made up in sweet-smelling linens from the sheets having hung on the line to dry in the wind and the sunshine. She thinks too of how Aunt Peggy—everyone, really—will comment on how much she’s grown. They haven’t seen her for two years—last August, Janey got her tonsils out and they couldn’t take their annual trip to North Dakota. Janey got all the ice cream she wanted in the hospital, but it didn’t make up for the burning pain. Everybody said it would, but it didn’t.

Janey sits up and spreads her map across her lap. Every time her family drives to North Dakota, she follows along on a map, x-ing out the states as they pass through them.

This time it will be Texas. Oklahoma. Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota. She already knows that South Dakota will seem the longest because it’s the one before you finally get there.

She yawns, considers car bingo, with its insulting juve-nile pictures of cows and railroad crossings, rejects it in favor of watching the telephone poles whip past, birds on
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the wire occasionally rising up in a great flurry of flapping wings, a choreography of surprise and fear.

At the restaurant where they stop for lunch on the second day, the silverware is in an envelope of waxed paper, and the waitress calls her father “honey.” She doesn’t know not to be so familiar; he’s not in uniform, and he is using his vacation manners: no orders, no yelling, no gruff inquiries as to where he left his burning cigarette. He winks at Janey’s mother, and her mother smiles back. They are always in their own club.

Janey asks if she can have a hamburger, and her mother says of course. “Cheeseburger, I mean,” Janey says, “and can I have French fries, too?”

Her mother ignores her, so she asks again for French fries. “If you
want
them,
get
them,” her mother says. Janey holds one hand with the other and squeezes it.

“Get them,” her mother says, more softly now.

Janey shrugs.