Fight Night(40)

Grandma and Lou sat close together. Lou asked Grandma if she’d ever in all her life lost her faith. Grandma said, Oh! Uppy! That’s Lou’s nickname from when he was a baby and always wanted to be picked up. Of course I have! Yeah? said Lou. Wunt you tell us all about that?

She had a fight with God for ten years. That’s how you know she loves him. Grandma held Lou’s hand while she told us about her fight. She believes that God is love and that love is in each one of us even if we don’t believe in God. I’ve never felt forsaken, she said. But for about ten years she stopped praying. She had prayed and prayed that Grandpa would get healthy and be okay. He wasn’t. He only got worse and worse. So she stopped praying for that and started praying and praying that she’d have the strength to take care of him. Well, finally, she stopped praying altogether. When her friends and family from her town would ask her to pray for them she would be quiet and try to change the subject because she couldn’t pray anymore. But still! said Grandma. She didn’t feel forsaken. She’d never felt forsaken, even when she was sixteen and desperately sad and lonely and her mother had died and her brothers had put her far away in boarding school and stolen her inheritance. She knelt by her bed every night and prayed, Please God, don’t forsake me, please God, don’t forsake me. And she felt peace inside herself somewhere. She knew it was there, peace from God, she just didn’t know exactly where. Like her will and important papers. She knows they’re somewhere in the house, but where? She laughed, and Lou nodded, and Ken and Jude nodded, too. I wondered where the peace was. I wondered what forsaken meant.

Enna-way, Grandma said. That was then. I stopped praying for ten years. Now I’m praying again. When she moved in with me and Mom she started to pray again. That made Lou and Ken laugh. Jude stayed serious, listening and nodding. Grandma said she prayed and prayed that God would make her a good and useful member of our household. Jude said she thought God had really answered that prayer, huh Swiv? I agreed with Jude but it was too embarrassing to say that out loud. I nodded. Grandma winked at me. She kept talking. She said she can’t really read the Bible anymore because when she reads it she only hears authoritarian old men’s voices. But she knows so much of it by heart and repeats to herself the verses that mean the most to her all the time. And before she goes to sleep every night she sings a song from her old town called a hymn which her mother sang to her, and it’s so comforting, and she’s always asleep before she can finish singing the song. Do you know the song, Swiv? asked Lou. I said yeah, Grandma sings it to me too sometimes. Grandma said that every night before she goes to bed she also quotes a verse from Lamentations. She recited it for us: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. She cried a bit telling us these things. She made me get her red purse. She fished around in there and took out an old piece of paper and showed it to everyone. It was a note from Mom from when Mom was seventeen years old. It was something encouraging about God’s love. Grandma takes it with her everywhere. I decided to write a note like that to Mom too, but I didn’t know anything about God. I could write something hopeful from Beyoncé, though, and Mom could carry it around forever. Lou had his arm around Grandma’s shoulders. Jude brought her water with ice. Ken had an ice machine in his fridge. Should we sing that song? said Lou. His mom Irene, Grandma’s sister, had sung it to him and Ken too! They knew the words. Then they all started singing, half in English and half in Grandma’s secret language. Jude didn’t know the song. She smiled at them while they sang. She cried a bit too. Lou looked happy. He really sang the song properly and seriously.

I knew the words but I didn’t want to sing. I wanted to go sailing. Grandma has good instincts. She saw me dying there at the table with crying, singing, suffering adults and she came to my rescue. Fohdich metten zigh! That’s a thing she says to energize herself. She smacked the table. That meant enough of being forsaken or not being forsaken, let’s move the blazes on! She asked Lou about starting a marching band. He didn’t know what she was talking about, but Grandma said she was dead sure he’d sent her an e-mail a few months ago saying he was thinking about starting a marching band. Then Ken and Jude started talking about marching bands too and they were all laughing and yelling which made me feel like I could leave the table and wander around the house looking at things.



After lunch Grandma and I lay down in the bed next to Mao. Oh! I said. Compression socks! I got up and took off Grandma’s socks. It was so easy, they just slid off like straw wrappers. Ah, merci beaucoup, said Grandma. Can you fish out my Dead Heat? I got her book and gave it to her. I rolled her socks into a ball and put them in the side pocket of her little suitcase. I went back into the kitchen to get a glass of water for her to swallow her pills. Her metoprolol fell onto the floor. Bombs away, Swiv! she said. I dropped down onto my knees fast and crawled around looking for it. I saw something under the bed. It was a thong! Which is panties. Grandma’s metoprolol was sitting right next to them. They were touching. I picked up the metoprolol and handed it to Grandma. There’s something under there, I said, very quietly. What? said Grandma. I went to the bathroom that was attached to the bedroom and turned on all the taps and flushed the toilet so Lou and Ken and Jude wouldn’t hear me. Then I ran back to Grandma and said it louder. Your metoprolol was beside a pair of panties, I told Grandma. Under the bed. Those must be Judith’s! she said. She laughed. Shhhhhhh, Grandma, I said. I got up and ran to the bathroom and turned off all the taps and lay back down beside Grandma. So Jude is Judith.