Chinese Handcuffs

by Chris Crutcher

  “Jen, what’s this all about?”

  “I can just tell you it’s really important,” Jen said. “Really important. They’re probably not home yet anyway. You could say you called and no one answered. You could say I gave you the wrong number.”

  “Jen, this is a little strange. . . .”

  “I know it’s strange, but could you? Just this once?”

  Coach Sherman searched Jennifer’s eyes for a clue to the sense of this but saw only the urgency. Truth was, this kid could get almost anything she wanted from Kathy. Jen was the most easily coached kid she’d had, and her intensity reminded her of a young Kathy Sherman. She was aware that alone bought Jen extra room with her. Not that she needed it. “Okay, I’ll take her home. But I have to call in the morning. And if you’re going to ask me to do things like this, I’m going to expect an explanation sometime in the near future.”

  “Thanks,” Jen said, and closed her eyes.

  Knowing Dawn was with Coach Sherman released Jennifer into a warm, half-conscious state as she lay back to await being transferred to a room. Vaguely aware of her damp, cold uniform covered only by her warm-up top, and her hair matted against her forehead with sweat, she drifted, floating weightlessly back to the last time in her life she really felt safe—felt as if she didn’t have to be suspect of everything around her.

  She’s five. Her grandfather is there, sitting in his overstuffed chair with a storybook in his lap, a Dr. Seuss book. . . .

  “C’m’ere, J. Maddy. Let Grampa read you some poetry,” and Jen automatically glances up in delight. “This here’s real poetry. None of them ‘silver bells and cockled shells’ an’ the rest of that foolishness.”

  To Jennifer and Grampa, real poetry means Horton. Or the Long Legger Kwongs from Scrambled Eggs Super, or Bartholomew Cubbins’ five hundred hats. Jennifer slides across the room and crawls up into her grandfather’s lap, leaning in against his soft red plaid flannel shirt, which smells of cherry pipe tobacco and car engine grease, easily the best-combined olfactory experiences in existence to a five-year-old girl who worships the old man who always keeps her safe and always reads real poetry.

  “Now, J. Maddy, you can read right along with me if you want,” Grampa says. His voice is rich and deep, and he talks in a slow drawl, though there is nothing southern in his history. He’s a big man, with a huge, round head full of silver hair and a handlebar mustache. His fingers are short and thick, with dirt under the nails, always dirt under the nails, which Gramma complains about night and day, but which Jennifer considers part of Grampa’s fingers.

  “You’re gettin’ right smart for your age,” Grampa says, then laughs. “And for your breeches, too. So if you wanna read along, you go right ahead.” He calls her J. Maddy because her middle name is Madeline—his own sister’s name—and he put up a pretty good fight for an old man in the hospital five years ago, when his son and daughter-in-law were filling out the birth certificate, to have Jen’s first and middle names in the reverse order of what they wanted, but he lost in the end, as he always does in this family. He wanted her named after his sister because she had been the only human being on the face of the earth he really trusted. She was gone now, and he hoped he could re-create that trust with his granddaughter, the way he failed to do with his wife and family.

  The trust is there, and to him Jennifer is J. Maddy.

  “Sighed Mayzie, a lazy bird hatching an egg:

  ‘I’m tired and I’m bored

  And I’ve kinks in my leg

  From sitting, just sitting here day after day.

  It’s work! How I hate it.

  I’d much rather play. . . .’”

  Jennifer reads right along with Grampa. She doesn’t really recognize many of the words by sight, but she’s heard Horton’s saga of hatching Mayzie’s egg so many times she can say it in her sleep.

  “We’re moving you now.” A nurse, one Jennifer hadn’t seen before, touched her gently on the forehead. “I want you to slide off the table and sit in this wheelchair, okay?”

  Jennifer opened her eyes, unable to tell if she had been asleep or simply daydreaming. Seconds passed before she realized where she was. Grampa was so real. “Yeah, sure,” she said after a moment, and sat up slowly, then eased herself down into the chair. The dizziness seemed to have passed, and the maneuver was not difficult.

  She was being moved to a private room because it was the only one available, the nurse explained, and because they intended to wake her up periodically during the evening to check her responses.

  The nurse was out of the room only seconds before . . .

  Jennifer is back in her grandfather’s lap, clapping with glee as the egg hatches and out flies a miniature elephant with wings, an exquisite replica of Horton himself, his reward for patience and tenacity through what could only be described as pachyderm hell.

  Jennifer’s dad, her real dad—who appears in her dreams and fantasies only as a shadow, with no real face or weight or size—lurks in the kitchen doorway and watches them read. A coldness washes over Jen, and she moves tighter into Grampa’s flannel shirt, concentrates harder on Horton’s delight and Mayzie’s rage, as if to wipe out her father’s presence. She does not know he will be out of her life very soon, only to be replaced by something worse. Only with Grampa is she safe.

  “You’re spoiling that girl rotten,” says Jen’s grandmother from the front porch. “You won’t live forever, you know. What’s she gonna do when you’re gone? I can’t be reading to her twenty-four hours a day, and neither can her mother. Who even knows if her father can read?” These last words—the words about her father—are spit out with such contempt they feel like arrows to Jennifer.

  Grampa is always short with Gramma. It seems the only way to protect himself from her poisonous tongue. There is little warmth between them even in the best of times, little warmth anywhere in the family, really. “Can’t be done,” Grampa says. “Can’t spoil a five-year-old. Not with time. Not with love.” He shakes his head. “Can’t be done.” He runs his thick fingers through Jennifer’s hair, smiles his tired smile, and whispers, “Don’t ever believe that. Anytime anyone tries to spoil you, just soak it up. You hear?”

  Jennifer smiles secretly at him and nods. Though she can’t put words to the feelings, she senses that her days of being “spoiled rotten” by Grampa are numbered. She has seen him do strange things lately, things that cause the rest of the family to look at each other and shake their heads behind his back. Yesterday at lunch Grampa put chicken gravy on his ice cream. Jen started to laugh—she thought Grampa was making a joke—but he looked so confused it scared her and she didn’t tell him. He thinks it’s potatoes, Jen thought when she saw him pour the full ladle of gravy over his dessert; he just forgot. But then he ate it. He must think those are awful cold potatoes, she thought, but she couldn’t shake the idea that something was going wrong with Grampa. Not long ago he got lost coming home from the store, and the police brought him back. Jen watched him get out of the police car and stand at the end of the walk, looking confused, and she ran out to him, yelling and squealing, and that brought him right back. She does that sometimes, and sometimes it works. She makes loud noises when he seems confused. But he’s okay way more than he’s not okay, and Jen sees it as her job to help him when she can.

  Now Grampa stands in the middle of a field. They live in Lawrence, Kansas, and springtime has created a rich greenness that stretches forever. Towering, white billowy clouds fill the deep blue sky, and the sun shines brightly on his silver hair. Jennifer stands watching him, edging closer as she glimpses the shadow that is her father on the horizon. It is a pathetic shadow, but also giant somehow, one that fills her from inside, chokes her. Grampa stands tall in the field with a beveled wooden object hanging from his hand. Jennifer recognizes from Grampa’s exaggerated pomp that this is yet another of the toys that will be named after her, like J. Maddy Yo-Yo and J. Maddy Hula-Hoop (which Grampa can skid almost halfway across the lawn and make retu
rn on its own English). These are all toys that go away and come back.

  “This is J. Maddy Boomerang,” Grampa says. “J. Maddy Boomerang, I want you to meet J. Maddy Lawless.”

  J. Maddy Lawless says hi.

  J. Maddy Boomerang hangs from Grampa’s hand.

  “J. Maddy Boomerang,” Grampa continues, “flies far and free. She flies up to the clouds, past the clouds to the other side of the moon, where princesses are monsters and monsters are friends. They tease her and terrify her and tickle her silly.”

  Jennifer is mesmerized by Grampa’s nonsensical tale, as she always is, staring at J. Maddy Boomerang hanging innocently at his side.

  “And then she flies home, where it’s safe and warm and there’s plenty of Ho-Hos and Ding-Dongs and chocolate-covered grasshoppers.”

  “Oooooh.” Jen wrinkles her nose. “Chocolate grasshoppers? She eats grasshoppers?”

  “She surely do,” Grampa says, and with a flip of his elbow and wrist he sends the boomerang spinning forward, climbing, climbing toward the majestic clouds. Jennifer watches in amazement as it starts back toward them in a wide arc. Grampa moves close to protect her, and together they watch it dig into the dirt less than ten yards from where they stand. Jennifer cheers and runs to retrieve it. They repeat the story and the act, and Jennifer helps Grampa make up new creatures for the kingdom on the other side of the moon. She tries throwing the boomerang herself a few times but is quickly stymied. The ghostly presence of her father sits on the horizon like a dull ache on the edges of her consciousness.

  It’s night—very late at night—when Jennifer’s father creeps into her room. She can’t remember when it started—can’t remember the first time. Maybe he has always come, though now he stays longer. She lies awake, dreading the faint creak of the door, followed by the soundless sensation that someone is very near. She feels his pressure on the end of the bed and waits through the silence until he chooses to talk. This is why she tries to stay with Grampa most of the time. But there are always times when she can’t work it out, can’t get Gramma to let her stay there, or can’t get Grampa to stay at her house. When she can, she keeps him up very late—until after her folks go to bed—playing and reading stories. Often then he falls asleep on her bed and she sleeps easy, sheltered. But Grampa isn’t here tonight. Daddy is. And Daddy starts to talk. Jennifer doesn’t really understand all his words, but he talks about her body, and he tells her he loves her a lot, but it doesn’t feel like it does when Grampa says it. It feels good—kind of—in a strange sort of way, but it also feels icky. Daddy seems like a little boy now, really, and he puts his hands up inside Jennifer’s nightgown and touches her in places that her mother calls “privates” when she washes them in the bathtub. It feels awful to be touched there, but it feels good to make Daddy feel good; any other time he almost never does. And it’s a secret. Jennifer is very good at keeping secrets. It’s her very best thing, Daddy says. It’s something we can never tell or Mommy will get very sick and people will come and take Jennifer away. She wants to tell. If she told someone, it would be Grampa, but this is really the only warm feeling she has with anyone in her family except him. It’s the only time Daddy seems to love her.

  “Jennifer. Jennifer.” The voice came from far away, and Jennifer struggled to bring it into focus. “I need to look in your eyes again, all right, Jennifer?” A dim light—probably a night-light—illuminated the room, and a woman in white stood over her with a small penlight. Jennifer remembered where she was and rested back against the pillow. She told the nurse to go ahead, following the instructions to the letter.

  “Your eyes are dilating about the way they should be now,” the nurse said. “I probably won’t be waking you again.”

  Jennifer nodded and said that would be a relief. “If they stay that way, can I get out of here tomorrow?” she asked.

  “I’m sure you can,” the nurse answered. “We just wanted to be sure you weren’t going to have any difficulty. You took a pretty hard hit, they tell me.”

  Sitting beside Grampa on the big couch at his house, Jennifer attempts to put together a Dumbo the Elephant puzzle. The puzzle has more than fifty pieces and is, in fact, too complex for her, but the pieces seem to materialize very close to where they belong whenever she gets stuck. Grampa tells her she must be a born puzzle fixer. “We’re here at ABC’s Wide World of Puzzles,” he says in his best Howard Cosell voice, “and young J. Maddy Lawless is attempting to put together the never-before-assembled Dumbo Circles High Above the Big Top, a six-quadrillion-piece monster of a puzzle that has baffled experts in seven countries and fourteen tropical islands.”

  “Grampa, you talk funny,” Jennifer says as an all-gray piece of Dumbo’s ear appears magically by her finger, less than an inch from where it belongs. “You sound like that guy that talks on TV. The one at Monday football.”

  “Yes, I do,” Grampa says, slipping into his W. C. Fields, but then he stops, a little dazed, and looks at Jennifer, reaching across his body with his right hand to his left, massaging a bit, looking puzzled.

  “Say some more, Grampa,” Jennifer says. “Say some more about what a great puzzle lady I am. Put me on television some more.”

  Grampa looks bewildered now, feels his arm again, and shakes his head. He moves his hand tentatively back to the puzzle pieces but only fingers them absently. He hears a buzzing sound, then is smashed with a hammer to the chest. “J. Maddy . . .” he starts again in Cosellese, but it trails off. Then: “J. Maddy, you go get your mother, okay? Go get her and tell her Grampa needs to see her right away.”

  “I think she went to the store. She said she’d be back in—”

  “J. Maddy, you go get your momma now, you hear? You go get your momma and tell her to come right in here, okay, J. Maddy?”

  Jennifer looks into Grampa’s eyes, but he’s not in there. He’s not looking very far past his face, and he’s rubbing one arm with the other hand, then clutching at his chest. He blinks twice, but Jennifer doesn’t think he sees anything.

  “She’s at the store, Grampa,” Jennifer says, and now she’s getting scared. “Grampa, are you all right? Are you all right, Grampa?”

  “J. Maddy,” he says; but Jennifer can see he’s not really talking to her, and he grabs his chest and slumps to the side. She crawls quickly across the coffee table, knowing something is terribly wrong, and she’ll never get this puzzle together without him, that she won’t be safe. . . .

  Jennifer stands on the couch and braces herself under Grampa’s shoulder, trying to push him back up. She knows if she can sit him upright, like he was a minute ago, he’ll be okay. But the weight . . .

  He seems to fold over her when she pushes, engulfs her, so she crawls across his lap to the other side and tries to pull him up by his left shoulder. It doesn’t work, but she’s sure if she can just get him upright, get him sitting. Like he was . . .

  It’s fifteen or twenty minutes before Jennifer is able to get Grampa sitting up. Her tiny body is soaked with sweat from trying to perform this impossible task, but never once does she think to go for help. It doesn’t occur to her that anyone in the family would want to help. Grampa has always been hers, like she is his. They are two people at far ends of the spectrum, and they don’t matter in this house, unless, of course, you count when Mommy wants her to show off how smart she is or that late-night time when her daddy sneaks into her room. That matters. . . .

  For more than a half hour Jennifer remains wedged against Grampa’s ribs, propping him up in his sitting position. She continues with the puzzle, at least the parts she can reach, and Grampa is long gone. Jennifer talks to him as if he were still there, magically guiding her hands to the right places with the right pieces; but the going is slower, and several pieces have been forced into the wrong spots. “Does this one go here?” she asks patiently, waiting about the right amount of time for an answer, then: “Guess not, maybe here.” Tears stream down her face, but she refuses to let what is real be real. When Grampa’s gone
, well, who knows what when Grampa’s gone?

  It all falls apart when Jennifer’s mother walks into the room from the kitchen, where she has just set down two sacks of groceries on the counter. She is talking as she walks through the door, though Jen has no idea what she’s saying. There is dead silence, then a muffled shriek as her mother sees Grampa’s dead eyes staring somewhere off the arm of the couch, his face ashen.

  “Jennifer! Jennifer!” her mother yells at her, but Jennifer stares valiantly at the puzzle, trying to figure how the feather goes into Dumbo’s trunk. “Jennifer, your granddad . . .”

  Jen stares harder at the puzzle.

  Her mother takes Jen by the waist and pulls her away from the couch, and Grampa slumps over. Jen automatically moves back to try to prop him up, but her mother snatches her again by the waist and points her toward the door. “You go outside, dear,” she says desperately. “I’ll see to Grampa.”

  Jen turns on her mother then, eyes blazing, defiant. “You won’t see to Grampa,” she says between gritted teeth, her hands locked onto her hips, upper body protruding over her legs so far as to defy gravity. “You won’t see to Grampa. Grampa’s dead. He’s dead. Nobody ever sees to Grampa.” Her mother’s hand flashes out and slaps her hard across the face. The tears and the snot begin to run then, but Jen holds her ground. “And nobody ever sees to me!” she yells, and runs out of the room.

  Her mother stands stunned, as usual, totally ineffectual at dealing with either crisis. She turns to her father’s corpse. . . .

  Jennifer feels the steel casing start to form around her heart from her perch in the tree just outside the back porch. First her father comes home, sees her there but makes no acknowledgment and disappears into the house. After her father come the fire department and a policeman. Grampa is taken away on a long bed with wheels, and his whole body is covered with a blanket. Jennifer can’t see him, but she knows it’s him. Then other people start to arrive; some she knows are aunts and uncles and cousins and some are just neighbors. Some she doesn’t know at all. Several folks look at her up in the tree, and a few make feeble attempts at coaxing her down; but Jennifer will not budge. She will sit there well into the night.