Fight Night(10)

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!