Fight Night(12)

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.

I pulled Mom by the hand and told the shop owner very quietly that Mom was pregnant. Mom shouted, This is not about being pregnant! She tried to rip the tinkling thing off the door when we left. Everybody was quiet in the card shop. Mom huffed and puffed all the way home. She couldn’t stand how tasteful the shop was and how white the shop owner’s teeth were. I started to say, And you really hate modern thermostats, don’t you? But by then Mom was off in a world of her own, softly growling and trying to lower her heart rate with her precious Alexander technique.

Grandma had the conchigliettes ready for us, with her Guatemalan woven placemats and candlelight and special blue glass candleholders that Auntie Momo had given her two weeks before she died. Grandma tried to get Mom to relax by making her laugh or at least move her lips into the shape of a smile. She asked Mom if she knew about positions to have sex in when you’re pregnant. Her friend Wilda said her daughter was teaching a pre-natal course at the Y and it was just amazing what the body could do and accommodate. Mom said oh god, Mom. Who am I having sex with? Grandma said no, of course not, she knew that, but just in general. She started listing positions that were comfortable to have sex in. Stop! I said. Ho! said Grandma. Why not talk about this? I said, Because it’s not funny. Funny! said Grandma. It’s not supposed to be funny! Mom sat with her arms crossed. Her head was tipped way over to the right. Okay, said Grandma. You want Grandmas to be funny history lessons all the time, not the Kama Sutra. Well, I had one dress made out of branches to last me for eighteen years and no shoes or cellphone when I was your age, Swiv. Is that better? When Euripides, Zapata, McClung and I were young we had to eat trees and drink our own urine to survive. Luckily we had two sets of sharp teeth, like sharks. Our grandparents were sharks. We had to visit them at Christmas and Easter underwater. They loved us so much. They made us eat so much. They didn’t speak English. They were so slippery and it was hard to hug them goodbye. We’d laugh and laugh about how slippery Grandma and Grandpa were. People hibernated back then, not just bears. We all fell asleep in the fall from late October to early April.