Making Nice (7 page)

In a car, though, I’m stuck, and the entire drive up from Wilmington had been a nonstop series of seat adjustments and shoulder rolls, opening and closing windows, switching CDs and tinkering with the volume knob, rubbing my eyeballs and punching myself in the legs, as if hurting the leg hurts the ache that’s in it. I smoked a lot of cigarettes, cracked my knuckles, my ankles, my back and my neck, cracked everything that was crackable and bobbed my head in order to make a smashed bug on the windshield appear to fly just above the treetops bordering the interstate, until I banged my chin on the steering wheel while attempting to clear a particularly tall pine outside of Richmond. When that got old, I looked for things to look at: the rearview, the rearview, trees, a dead dog next to a blue hospital sign and
GOD BLESS OUR SOLDIERS BEEFY BURRITO $1.39
, the rearview—anything but the road itself. I’ve been in over a dozen accidents, all of which were my fault. I hit a bridge once. I drove through a closed garage door. It’s stopping I have a problem with.

I got up from the couch, wrote a note on the back of my mother’s note, took the horsey doll, and headed off to see my grandmother.

*   *   *

The nursing home parking lot was filled with cars that looked alike, except for a running ambulance with two EMTs leaning on it. I smiled at my shoes as I passed them, walked around to the front, where three women in wheelchairs were feeding gray-purple pigeons, and felt a little guilty when I heard their squeaky wings and realized I’d scared them off. I apologized to the woman closest to me, who had eyes like two copper coins floating in fog.

As I made my way down a long hallway I passed the activities board, and the week was jam-packed with Balloon Tennis and Music-and-Motion and Let’s Make Oriental Fans, Pet Visits and Grandma’s Handbag and
Elizabeth Rafter turns 101 years old!!!
At the reception desk a book lay open with four columns—Name, Date, Time, Visiting—and behind it a white nurse in pink scrubs sat not smiling with a half-eaten sandwich in front of her. I said hello and asked her if it was a turkey sandwich.

“Ham,” she said.

I didn’t believe her. Then I asked her if she could tell me where my grandmother was and she asked me if I could spell my grandmother’s last name. I could and did, and she looked it up on her computer—typey typey typey, return—told me her room was B10 but that she might be in the dining hall, then took half of the half of sandwich in one bite.

B2, B4, B6, B8—I thought of Battleship, my favorite childhood game. My brother liked Connect Four and used to lick the leftover Italian dressing off his salad plate. My grandmother wasn’t in her room, but her roommate was, in bed, her body bent and twisted with MS or some other awful thing, her mouth open to the cracks in the ceiling. I said hello and she said nothing at all, and above her bed hung a painting of Jesus Christ floating up to heaven, topless and staring directly into the camera, his arms spread wide like,
Behold, cameraman
 …
I’m flying!
Another possibility, it seemed to me, was that he was fleeing, and I imagined knocking him out of the sky with a rock.

Nailed to the wall above my grandmother’s bed was a small wooden crucifix and pictures of my dead grandfather and their children and their children’s children—the same picture that hung in our hallway of my brother, sister, and me naked in a bathtub together, which probly saved time but doesn’t seem like any way to get clean. I said goodbye to my grandmother’s roommate, then waved bye at her, then felt dumb about it and walked out.

Wandering around the hallways I overheard an old man report to a nurse that another man “killed me on the back of the leg six days ago,” and a woman using a dirty-tennis-balled walker was staring into a fish tank to apply light red lipstick. I stopped at the front desk again, and the now sandwichless nurse pointed me toward the dining hall, a large room with six or seven long tables in it. It was full but quiet except for the TV and a lady rocking violently hollering for someone-or-thing named Mashtar, and as I looked from face to face it occurred to me that women make the mistake of living too long more than men do.

My grandmother was seated at the table farthest from the window, pinching her paper bib and staring at the wall. I walked over and put a smile on my face so fake it trembled. She had a see-through mustache and the hairs were longer at the corners of her mouth. I kissed her forehead.

“What’s up, Grams, heard you ate your medicine patch.”

“Sydney?”

“No … I’m your daughter’s son. Alby.”

Something inside her shifted, she shook, and her eyes wandered off, following butterflies or parakeets or the word
pajamas
ticker-taping across her eyeballs, a monkey riding a dog or pink fighter jets on their way to kill kill kill. Or more likely they were following nothing at all, which at that moment was somewhere on the white wall between the clock and the television advertising deodorant.
Smell cool
.

Her eyes went wide. “Everything’s getting weird.”

“It’s always been weird. Here’s a horsey doll.”

I took her shaking, spotted hand and tried to put the doll in it, but she wouldn’t take it, so I placed it on the table in front of her.

“Don’t eat the comb,” I said.

She reached out and knocked the horsey doll over, then recoiled her shaking hand in a way that reminded me of a vacuum cleaner cord retracting.

“It’s OK,” I said. “It’s just a toy.”

She looked off, and after a while I waved my hand in front of her face. “Grandma,” I said, snapping my fingers now. “Hello? Yoo-hoo.”

She looked at me and flashed her gums in what I think was a smile.

“The pope came,” she said.

“On a kid’s back?”

I half-regretted it almost immediately, because who am I to insult something that gave her comfort? I’m all for painkillers, just prefer mine in pill form. Pints and rocks glasses. Ladies.

“He said … everybody should speak English…”

“Don’t popes speak Latin,” I said, “and like, refer to themselves in the first person plural?
We am the Harriet Tubman of pedophiles.
Did We explain We’s hostility toward women, gaylords, and science? How about common-sense issues like condoms as a way of preventing AIDS and, you know, not allowing priests to rape children’s buttholes and mouths? Did We say anything about that, Grandma? Because I think that We—never mind.”

I half-regretted that almost immediately, too, but before I could apologize she started singing a song in Italian or Nonsense, I couldn’t tell the difference, just sat there listening to her until the antsy feeling I get settled somewhere in my chest and I felt like moving again. I stood up to leave, but something about the smallness of her voice—the pitch, my inability to understand her, the helplessness of it—made me feel lonely for her. So I resolved to stay at least until my mother showed up, and I sat back down as four nurses in pink scrubs wheeled in four carts stacked with orange trays of food. It wasn’t long before my grandmother stopped singing, and then we just sat there quietly, she staring at her special spot on the wall, me at the TV, watching the end of a commercial where a young girl on a beach goes, “I need a brownie…” and then all her friends chime in with,
“Oh yeah, she’s menstrual!”
and laugh.

Eventually a tray was placed on the table in front of us, on it a dish of pureed meat and what I think was pureed rice, a bowl of something orange, red Jell-O, a glass of thickened water, a glass of thickened milk, and a cup of thickened tea.

“Will you be feeding her today?” asked the nurse.

“I’d rather not,” I said, and she gave me this look, so I said, “I’d better not,” and she gave me the same look as before, in fact I don’t think she ever changed it, so I said I’d try.

I started with the meat because it was the most brown, which seemed important. I took a heaping spoonful, asked, “Ready?” and as my grandmother said yes I stuck it in. She coughed and spit up on her chin. “Wup,” I said, and wiped it off with the bib.

I’m sure at one point it looked as if I was trying to feed her left cheek. At another, her nostrils. I flicked tea off her shoulder. But soon enough we found our rhythm, Grandma and me, and we settled into it. I’d scoop a heaping spoonful of something, hold it up in front of her so she could see it, then announce what I thought it was. “Rice,” I’d say. “I think this is rice.” Then I’d slowly bring it to her lips and wait until she parted them. I’d slide the spoon and its contents in and tip it up until she’d close her mouth around it. Then I’d draw the spoon out and watch her jaw as she swished the stuff around before swallowing. It was strangely satisfying, our method. It meant there was an understanding. Sometimes I think all I ever want is an understanding.

After twenty or so messy minutes I’d spooned in everything except the milk. I felt proud about this. I was excited to tell my mother. See, Ma? I’m helpful. I’m a good boy. Then I considered her note, my watch, did math. She should be here already, I thought. Any minute.

Grandma, I said. Eat this. Eat it. It’s milk. Eat the milk. You need milk, milk’s good for you. Eat it. Eat the milk. Grams. Grandma. Hey. Grandma. Grandma. Grams. Grandma. Eat this for strength. Eat it. It’s milk. Eat it. Eat this. Eat the milk. Eat the milk the pope said eat the milk. The pope loves the milk. Eat it. Eat the milk.

But she just kept turning her head from it, side to side to side, and when she brought her shaking, spotted hand up to push it away, I faked left and went right and snuck it in there, through lips and over tongue, no teeth to stop me. She immediately coughed and retched and began throwing up a jelly rainbow just as my mother walked through the door with a big smile on her face that meant
hello how are you I’ve missed you I know you smoked in the house and what’s with the broken statue
, then seeing my vomiting grandmother went, “Ooooooh,” and nurses scattered, and someone called out for paper towels and repeated, “Paper towels!” and somebody else started patting my grandmother’s back, and somebody else got locked out of their house because somebody else didn’t leave the key, and somebody else bought the deodorant and somebody else bought whatever that girl on the beach was selling, tampons probably, and somebody else is dying because somebody else is always dying, people are always suffering and dying, and I just sat there holding the spoon, smiling nervously and then laughing nervously and then just laughing, and then laughing so hard my eyes started to water and everything got blurry, and none of it was funny at all.

T
HE
B
LOCK
, T
WICE

I once dated this girl who was skinny and flat-chested and could tap dance. Her name was Carey and she had a tiny lower jaw. When she was younger some of her bottom teeth had to be pulled to make room for the rest, and those came in crooked, pointed in different directions—maybe that’s why she dropped out of college. She waited tables at an expensive restaurant, made pretty good money. When she doodled, she doodled barns. She had blond hair and blond eyebrows, little blond hairs on her fingers, drove a blue Suzuki Sidekick. When she would come over I’d kiss her on her lip-glossed lips and say, “What’s up? How’s your blue Suzuki Sidekick? You’re my sidekick so why don’t you go tap dance on my kitchen floor.” She’d giggle. “I’m serious,” I’d say, and I was. I loved watching her tap dance, her little legs going, her little black shoes clicking louder than they should in celebration of nothing or everything in particular.

On weekend nights I’d go to the restaurant she worked at and drink at the bar. After she clocked out she’d sit next to me and we’d talk and pinch each other’s legs and stomachs, hold hands, watch how much the other servers tipped-out the busboys, whisper about injustice over discounted liquor and free chicken. Sometimes fish. Sometimes Joey, a lanky white kid who washed dishes, would come out front for a few minutes and rap for us, make words rhyme that didn’t—
I’m a hellion, explore vaginas like Magellian
—things like that. We’d hang out till the place would close up, eleven or twelve or four a.m. depending on I don’t know what, then we’d go back to my apartment, where I’d put on some ragtime and sit on the floor, watch her tap dance on the white tiles of my kitchen, applaud and cheer, laugh, shout nice things. “Better than Ben Vereen!” I’d yell, tackle her and take her clothes off, have unprotected sex with her for a minute.

The dessert chef at the restaurant was Billy Something, and Billy Something made a terrific baked Alaska and an OK crème brûlée and a weird-looking face when I staggered through the double doors of the kitchen late one night and grabbed him by his white coat collar and slammed him into the wall and said stop rubbing my girlfriend’s shoulders you fuckin’ dickhole. He had also turned Carey on to coke, but that didn’t bother me nearly as much as the fact that he felt comfortable rubbing her shoulders in my presence, and that she seemed to like it. I was still shaking him when Joey and this other guy whose name I can’t remember but he had thick eyelashes, they hooked me by the armpits and dragged me outside, the whole time asking me if I was cool.

“You cool? You cool? You cool?”

“No,” I said, “I’m not cool. Stop asking me if I’m cool … asking me if I’m cool is making me not-cooler.”

They lit me a cigarette, lit themselves cigarettes, pep-talked me and told me to wait, left me sitting alone on a concrete square around a magnolia tree. I talked to myself about cannolis and motherfuckers while I pitched pieces of bark mulch at a brick wall. I spit and zipped my jacket’s zipper up and down and up, down and up, down, waited. Carey never came out.

The front door of the place was glass and locked. I knocked on it. I cupped my hands over my eyes and looked in, but I couldn’t see anybody. I pressed my ear to it. Knocked some more and waited, re-sat and waited, re-stood and knocked on the door again. I pounded on it. Yelled
hey
at it. Yelled
Carey
at it until the owner and head chef, James Morris—still thin and I never understood how a chef could be thin—he walked up on the other side of the door and said, “You should go home, Alby.”