by Dan Chaon
My paternal grandmother’s house was a perfectly symmetrical place, set in the middle of miles of wheatfields and lined on either side with elms. When I was small, there had been a tire swing in one of the trees. One day, while I was playing on it, the rope had broken and I dropped to the ground and got a concussion. My grandmother never put the swing back up, but on one of the highest branches, the knotted rope that held the tire remained. Years later, when I came to live with my grandmother, I found the rope there, with the tree trying to grow over it. The rope had cut deeply into a branch, and in the summer the tree would bleed brown sour-smelling juice from the place where the rope wounded it.
My grandmother had been on a slow, erratic decline for some months when my parents suggested she go to a rest home. They hated the unpredictability of it. They wouldn’t hear of her staying in that big house all alone, where anything might happen. But my grandmother didn’t want to leave. The compromise was that I would go stay with her.
It was the summer after I’d graduated from high school, and my parents, I think, were looking for ways to get me out of the house. They were happy people, and had found it hard to understand me when, in the months following commencement, I’d become distant, introverted; I was easily obsessed. For a while, I’d been interested in genealogy. I spent a full week poring over family trees, old Bibles, obituaries. At one point, I’d written down the ages at which all my relatives for the last four or five generations had died, and averaged them; from that, I was able to predict that I would be most likely to die sometime in March 2050. I’d also thought for a while that I might like to be a doctor, so I went to the library to check out medical books.
In one of the books, it showed a cadaver that students were dissecting. I hadn’t been able to resist turning back, again and again, to stare at it. It was an old woman, but there was something inhuman about her: the claylike, immobile face; the yellow-gray flaps of skin pulled back; the uterus; the womb divided. I’d been amazed and sickened to imagine that an infant may once have come from that place. But I couldn’t help looking, looking again.
My parents wanted to know what had made me so morbid, but I couldn’t tell them. I’d always thought that they read me better than I read myself. Once, my mother called me into her room and asked me to sit on her bed. “Do you . . .” She hesitated, then she wanted to know: “Do you ever think about bad things?”
“What do you mean?” They had never given me the Talk, and I was always expecting it. “Do you mean sex?”
“No-o,” she said, and she closed her eyes as if trying very hard to remember something. “I mean do you ever think about death? About doing yourself in?”
“Not really.”
“Well, you know that is the worst thing, the most evil thing a person can do.”
“Is it?”
“I hope that you would never do that to your father and me. And you should know that if you ever have thoughts like that. Bad thoughts. We are always here to talk to. We are always wanting and willing to help.”
It’s terrible to realize that your parents think you are crazy. That was why I agreed to go, and why it was so easy to put on a show of happiness when they were around.
I sometimes wondered whether I really was insane. There was a path I’d been on, a path that started when I was born and then moved along nicely—taking my first step, saying my first sentence, going to kindergarten, moving up grade levels; then I turned sixteen and I was able to drive, and then high school ended. There was a big chasm where the path should have been. That was the worst thing. And everyone thought I was weird when I told them this. Maybe I was.
I guess that, without really thinking about it, I’d been expecting that I would die any day. It wasn’t a suicidal impulse at all. It was just that it was impossible to imagine myself in the future, at thirty or forty—I couldn’t believe that I would ever reach those ages. Even twenty was obscure and cloudy enough to seem like a dream.
So, I expected it. The day before I moved my belongings to my grandmother’s house, I cut the grass at home, and I couldn’t help thinking of the story of how one of my friend’s cousins had a long stick thrown at him by the mower, which had pierced him right through the belly. I put my hand to my stomach, imagining my own look of shocked surprise, the green sweet smell that bleeds off each blade of cut grass all around me as I fall to the ground, my parents running toward me, their voices swimming in the roar of the mower—my mother’s hand on my forehead: “Honey, it’ll be all right. . . .”
I took off my clothes that night, and I noticed that there was a small lump on my inner leg. I lay awake, just breathing.
The room I was to stay in had that dusty smell that seems to hang over old people and their belongings, but otherwise it was empty. She brought in her old roll-away bed, and the rest, she said, was up to me.
She was an enormous woman, and apparently had been for many years—when I was small I called her the “big grandma,” to distinguish her from my mother’s mother. She always had loose, fat upper arms. As a child, I’d ask to hit them, lightly, because they’d wobble. “Those are my muscles,” she’d say, and grab me. I was always surprised by her strength.
It was hard to imagine that I was supposed to care for her. She still looked strong enough to arm-wrestle with me, like we used to do. After I’d unpacked the few things I brought, she came in, moving slowly, precisely, carrying bedding.
“I know this must be a burden on you,” she said. “Having to live with some old woman.” She said it in that loud, ironic voice, the one she used for witty comments—“Call me Bubbles,” she used to say when introduced to my father’s friends. But her voice had less of an edge now.
“No, Gram, I don’t care,” I said. “It’ll be fun staying. Like a sleepover.”
“Right,” she said. “But you know it may be longer than a sleepover. Maybe.”
I shrugged. “I’m glad to stay,” I said.
“I just want you to know that I don’t care what you do while you’re here. I know about boys your age. Come and go as you please. Come in as late or as early as you want, don’t mind me.”
I nodded, smiling. But I thought she was wrong about boys my age, or at least me—there wasn’t much likelihood of me going out carousing anymore. I hadn’t really spoken to my friends since graduation. They were all different now—headed off to college or the army or jobs or marriage—and I just let them go. It would never be the same.
“Like a beer?” my grandmother asked.
“Sure,” I said.
I was working nights at the St. Bonaventure radio station, six to midnight. I’d sign off the air at twelve, saying the last words of the night in my clearest, most noncommittal voice: “This is Kip Dubbs, on behalf of the entire staff and management of KBOV, wishing you a happy tomorrow and a very pleasant good night.”
I’d sit there, sometimes, in my swivel chair, staring at the microphone. There was such a silence. I could imagine all those radios out there, the click of stillness and then the steady brush of static, and it was as if I were presiding over a suddenly empty world. Outside the window everything was dark, none of the houses had lights, there were no cars on the streets.
And then I’d get into my car and drive home to my grandmother. Sometimes, she’d be waiting up for me, the radio static still whispering out of the little red transistor by her bed. “You sounded good tonight,” she’d tell me, or she’d ask me some question about the news. I’d always go to her room and stand by the foot of her bed, even if she was asleep. “I’m home, Gram,” I’d whisper, and if she was still awake she’d open her eyes. Otherwise, I’d stand there for a while, until she rustled or mumbled or sighed—that would reassure me, and I’d go on to bed.
My grandmother moved with exaggerated slowness, and in the morning with her big housecoat billowing around her, she seemed like an aquatic being, moving through water rather than air. She made huge, hearty breakfasts—eggs, toast, bacon, hash browns, apple sauce—as if they could fill th
e atmosphere with robustness and good health. Neither one of us ate much.
We never talked about the future. She never asked me about my plans, and of course I couldn’t ask about hers.
Instead, she told me that they really did call her Bubbles when she was young, but she couldn’t remember why, and she felt funny about it. She told me that she was once at a bus stop and hit a man over the head with her high-heeled shoe. She didn’t recall who he was, or what he’d done, but it knocked him out; she could see that clearly. In a quiet voice, she told me that the cruelest thing she’d ever done was to my father. He’d taken a dollar from her purse, and she caught him. As punishment, she pinned an index card to his shirt that said I STEAL FROM MY OWN MOTHER, and made him wear it to school. Now, she was sorry; she wondered if he’d ever really forgiven her. She told me that she didn’t have her first beer until she was fifty, when her husband died. She bought a case of Miller and sat there, alone, and drank it. It was the type of beer my grandfather had liked.
“I still like the taste of beer,” she said.
“That’s really funny,” I told her. That’s the kind of thing I’d say when we talked. I never said anything personal about myself. Her stories seemed as disembodied as trivia—the nickname without any reason behind it, the drinking alone in the house, told with irony but no pain. I couldn’t rattle things off so easily. Once, I wanted to tell her about the graduation party I’d been to with my high-school friends. I got drunk and hid from them. Something someone had said hurt my feelings, and I wanted them all to worry a bit, to hunt for me. But they only called my name for a short while. Before long, they were dancing again, and I sat in the closet watching them from a crack in the door. The beat of the music made them happy, and they were singing, flapping their arms. I was too embarrassed to come out, then: they’d see how childish I was. So I just sat there, and finally I fell asleep. When I woke, everyone was gone. I was alone in the dark living room of someone else’s house, and I had to sneak away into the early morning.
But I couldn’t tell my grandmother such things. I just smiled and listened. It was embarrassing to hear myself repeat over and over—“That’s really funny,” or “That’s really cool”—in my cheerful radio voice, empty headed, as if I wasn’t even in the same room with her.
I went home once or twice during the week, and my parent’s first question was always, “How is she?” I didn’t want them to worry. I didn’t tell them that she drank beer, because that would trouble them; I didn’t tell them that she washed a whole bottle of pills down the toilet because they were too big, she said, to swallow. I felt like she was a disreputable friend I was covering for.
Then they asked about me. Had I thought about what I wanted to do in the fall? My father wanted me to talk to a friend of his, an army recruiter.
“You may not believe me,” he said, “but I think the army would be very good for you.”
“You never know,” I said.
I told them I liked my job at the radio station. Then my father suggested I look into a communications college.
“We only want you to do something you like. It doesn’t matter how much money you make, so long as you’re happy.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “I know.”
Looking out to where the trees lined the yard, I smiled for them. “I’m working on it,” I said. “Believe me.”
“We’re here to help you,” my mother said. “Use us as a source of information. We can advise you.”
“I will,” I said.
Jim called me on the phone the day before he left for college. “But what are you going to do?” he kept saying. When I didn’t answer, he’d offer some inane suggestion. “Why don’t you—?” Finally, I just told him.
“Look,” I said. “I guess I really don’t give a shit about anything, anyway.”
He was pretty quiet. He didn’t call back.
I asked myself, Why does everybody care so much about the future? I never understood what made them think it would be better. How long before they all forgot me, I wondered, how long before the house, and my parents and my grandmother grew distant and faded in my mind’s eye. I wished things could stay the same; I hated the future.
We sat on the sofa one afternoon drinking beer out of cups because she didn’t like to drink out of cans and there were no clean glasses. We closed the shades and watched soap operas, stacking the cans on the coffee table.
“All the women on these programs smoke cigarettes,” she said. “Do you smoke?”
“No,” I said. “I tried once, but it made me cough.”
“I could never smoke,” she said. “I tried many times. I wished I could. I used to think it looked so sophisticated.” She looked at me for a moment, and then laughed.
“I also wanted to be a WAVE or a WAC or something in World War Two. A heartbreaker in a uniform.” She laughed again. “I was married, so I couldn’t go, of course. Your grandpa was already too old to go. I married such an old man, you know.” She finished her beer and then bent down to pour more into her cup. She didn’t laugh this time.
After the soap opera was over, we listened to records. When I played a song on the radio she liked, she’d have me bring it home so she could tape it. She liked Aretha Franklin. It reminded her of the blues, like in Chicago.
She got out her photo album to show me pictures of herself in Chicago. It was as if she wanted to prove that she wasn’t lying, that she really was once the person she remembered. There was a photo of her standing in front of Union Station with her feet carefully posed, like in ballet position. It was taken by some old man she’d stopped as he was passing. She looked like Betty Grable, I told her.
“How come people don’t look like that anymore?” I asked.
“Because they all look like me now,” she said, and laughed.
When I came home from work that night, all the lights were on. She’d usually go to bed long before I got home. Maybe, I thought, she’d fallen asleep in front of the TV or someone had come for a late visit unexpectedly.
But when I walked in the house, I heard her voice, loud and angry, and I thought she was arguing with someone.
“God damn it!” she was yelling. “God damn it!”
I took a tentative step, walking toward her voice. “Gram? . . .” I called out hesitantly. “Gram?”
She was lying on the floor of the bathroom in her floral nightgown, on her stomach. The nightgown was pulled up, revealing her bare legs and her panties. She looked up at me, and her eyes were wet and raw-looking from tears. “Kip,” she said. “God . . . damn . . . I slipped . . . I’ve been trying . . . Oh, I . . .”
I didn’t know what to do. I opened my mouth and shook my head. “I’ll call an ambulance,” I said weakly.
“No!” she cried, and her voice was ragged. “Just help me up! Please.”
I bent down and pulled her nightgown so that it covered her legs again. “I don’t know how to do this,” I said softly. I grasped her under the arms, and she flailed, struggling.
“It hurts!” she shouted, like a little girl. “It hurts me!”
I was able to get her into a sitting position, and we rested for a moment. She was breathing hard, tears falling onto the lace around her neck. “What am I going to do?” she said, stuttering, small hiccuping sobs breaking into her words. “What’s going to happen to me?” I touched her hair. I didn’t know how to help her. “Some nights,” she whispered, “some nights I wake, and I can’t move. And one night . . . I wet . . . and I couldn’t get up to change . . . But then I was better in the morning . . . I was all right . . . but what’s going to happen to me when I can’t?” Her voice was drifting off, and then, slowly, the sobs drifted off, as well. She bowed her head, and the whole house was quiet.
“I think I can make it now,” she said at last. She held my arm tightly, leaning, pulling, and then, with terrible slowness, and with my arm around her waist, she was able to stand.
“Will you be all right?” I asked. “Should I call a d
octor?”
“Let’s go to bed,” she said quietly.
I dreamed that I got out of the car when we stopped along the road; we were going on a long trip, she and I—passing through miles of wheatfields on a dirt road. Something had fallen out of the car, and I had to get it. I waded knee-deep in grass, hearing it hiss around me, and then I turned to see the car was gone, a red blur through waves of heat. I ran, waving my arms, but the weeds were as thick as water. And then I was running along the middle of the highway, calling after the car, which always seemed on the verge of disappearing over a hill. The shadow of an airplane passed over me. I looked up, and that was when the car came from behind, blaring its horn. I covered my face with my arms, and the car hit me. A dull thump. I could see my shadow arcing over the asphalt, and then I landed on the ground. My grandmother was bending over me, and I could feel my spine moving around loose inside me. I wanted to tell her not to move me, but when I opened my mouth there was no sound.
When I woke, the sheets were knotted around my lower legs, and I kicked at them, then finally had to reach down and untangle them with my hands. The house was silent, and I got up and walked in the dark to the living room. The moon gave the room a pale glow.
The photo book was lying on the coffee table where she’d left it that afternoon. I turned on the light and picked up the book.
All those pictures, pictures of people waiting. I shook my head.
When I looked up, my grandmother was standing there, with her housecoat billowing around her, her hand moving like something gently swaying in an underwater current.
I turned to her. “You’ll be all right,” I said softly, “won’t you, Gram?”
“Sure I will,” she said.
