Getting Off Clean

by Timothy Murphy

  My mother leaned over and brushed crumbs aggressively off my T-shirt. “Whaddya wanna ask, Eric? Just go ahead and ask it.”

  “What is it called?”

  “What is she called? We told you. Joan Erin Fitzpatrick. But we’re gonna call her Joani.”

  “I mean, what’s her thing called?”

  “It’s called Down’s syndrome. She’s got a moderate form. It’s not the most severe.” The name conjured for me the image of submerging, of my alien new baby sister, undiapered, attached to nothing, falling deeper and deeper in water or in black space, somehow losing brainpower as she fell.

  Brenda looked terrified. “Is she a ’tard?”

  “Brenda, don’t you dare let me hear that word again in this house. You don’t say it anywhere!” my mother said in her sharp I’m-disgusted-with-you tone. Brenda blushed, contrite. “She’s mentally retarded,” my mother went on, articulating the phrase at Brenda in further rebuke. “Mildly.”

  “Why did God make her like that?” I asked. I was thick in Sunday mass, CCD classes, and my grandmother’s constant Jesus-and-the-saints stories at the time; it wouldn’t have occurred to me that Joani’s condition was attributable to anything other than God’s pointed choice.

  My mother hugged me, brisk, businesslike. “Honey, he did it to see how good and how strong we could all be. Isn’t that right, Art?”

  My father had been standing by the living room window throughout this conference, silent, minutely examining something, maybe the state of the front lawn, which he had neglected in the past two weeks. It had been his first day back to work in a week; he was still in work armor, combed, buttoned, and polished, but around his leaking eyes and chapped mouth he looked permanently bugged.

  “Hunh, Terry?” I saw his head follow the arc of the neighbor’s Airedale cutting across the front yard; I saw the single loose lick of hair bob on top of his head when the dog barked outside. It was September.

  “Isn’t Joani a special chance for all of us to show God how good we can be to her and to each other? That’s what I just told Eric.”

  My father turned, glistening around the eyes. If you didn’t know him, you would have thought he had been crying, but he wasn’t; it was only his usual leakiness. He bongoed his stomach and smiled brightly at us.

  “Isn’t that right, Arthur?” my mother said in the same voice.

  “’Bout what, honey?”

  “About Joani. What I just said about her.”

  My father made one of his trademark creaking sounds before he answered, comic and exaggerated. “Your mother’s always right, Eric.” He stuck his thumbs in his belt loops and stretched his back.

  “I hate it when you say that,” my mother said, at the same time that Brenda squawked, “No, she’s not!” I think I laughed then. It was a familiar exchange, and for a moment I was glad that the four of us were in here and the special new challenge with the little white hands like uncooked biscuits was asleep down the hall. There was plenty of time to service God and contend with her later.

  * * *

  I’m tickling Joani now and she’s laughing harder when we both hear a protracted moan from her room, where Grandma is sleeping on the second twin bed. She’s seventy-six; a week ago, Auntie Irene stopped by her apartment to drop off fresh eggplant from the farm stand and found her lying on her bed, saying her rosary and breathing like she had an amplifier in her throat. On the way to the hospital in the ambulance, my grandmother asked Auntie Irene where she had put the eggplant.

  “Calm down, Ma. You’re sick,” Auntie Irene said, rearranging my grandmother’s rosary in her hands. “I left the eggplant on the table.”

  “It’s not gonna keep.”

  “Ma, it’s fresh. It’ll keep.”

  “You should have put it in the crisper. It’s not gonna keep in this muggy weather.”

  “I’m not thinking about the eggplant right now, Ma!”

  “You’re not, but I am. You never think about nothin’.”

  They said my grandmother had had a minor stroke. We all visited her on Saturday; at one point there were twenty of us in a pack outside her hospital room, waiting to visit in shifts of three at a time. A few days later Dr. Mullane let her out with a new round of pills.

  “Stay off your feet, Doris. Your children and your grandchildren can cook for themselves for a few weeks.”

  “Your mother raised a good son, Joey,” my grandmother said as my mother and aunts packed her up.

  Later, Dr. Mullane took my mother and her sisters aside and told them it was dangerous for my grandmother to go on living alone; what if this had happened in the middle of the night and she couldn’t get to the phone? He told them they should start thinking about alternative living arrangements. “Terry and I work at the two best nursing homes in the area and I still wouldn’t put my mother in one of those jail cells,” announced Auntie Irene.

  So now, while everyone figures out what to do with her, my grandmother is staying with us—sneaking into the kitchen in the afternoon when nobody’s home and cooking our dinners, amusing my father and me, worrying my mother, driving Brenda crazy, and scaring Joani awake with her snoring and moaning, like she’s moaning right now. I think I hear her moan after our grandfather, who died before I was born—“Oh, Georgie, oh, oh, oh!”—but I may be wrong.

  Joani looks dismayed. “What’s she yelling about?” she asks me.

  “She’s just talking in her sleep. Everybody does that. Especially old people.”

  “Who’s she talking to?”

  “She’s talking to the people in her dreams, like Grandpa and all her old friends. Don’t you have people you know in your dreams?”

  “I don’t have any dreams,” she says.

  “Everyone does. You have to, or you go crazy.”

  “I don’t have any,” she says flatly.

  “Oh. Well, I see.” But I can’t contest further, because I, too, usually remember only whether my dreams please me or trouble me, but never what happens or to whom, by whom. All tone, no content, which is maddening.

  “I’m gonna go wake her up,” Joani says abruptly, clambering out of the bed. I check my digital radio clock; it’s nine o’clock now.

  “Hold on. I’m coming,” I say, sitting up and pulling on my shorts while Joani waits by the door, giving me a skeptical look I can’t place.

  The bedroom is about ten times hotter than the rest of the house, and still dark from the drawn shades. Grandma’s lying in bed on her back, her short and stout frame obvious under the sheet, the same string of blue glass rosary beads she’s had since she was a girl clicking faintly in her hands.

  “What are you doin’, Grandma?” Joani says in a whisper.

  “I’m sayin’ my morning prayers,” she says in her loud, half-deaf voice. “I’m prayin’ that I live to see your children, and your children’s children.”

  “You’ve got a lot of years ahead of you, Grandma,” I say, knee-jerk, and sit down on the floor by the bed. Joani belly-flops into the bed next to our grandmother. The two of them have always been buddies; our grandmother doesn’t treat Joani any differently, but I’m pretty sure that’s because she hasn’t caught on that there’s anything different about her. She thinks all her grandchildren are brilliant, which is flattering but highly debatable if you knew all my cousins.

  “How you feeling today, Grandma?” Joani asks, curling up next to her.

  “I feel good today. God’s putting me back to normal. I’m gonna get up and cook for the big barbecue today.”

  “I think Ma’s cooking everything, Grandma, and Brenda’s helping. You should try to rest,” I say.

  She snorts broadly. “Brenda can’t cook. She could cook good if she set her mind to it, but she doesn’t. How can she learn to cook when she’s always outta the house? I ask her if she wants me to show her and she tells me she’s got other plans. Good for her, Miss Busy Bee.”

  “Brenda doesn’t have time to cook, Grandma,” I say. “She works fifty hours a week at th
e card shop. She’s a career woman.” I love saying this to my grandmother about Brenda. It drives her crazy.

  “So what!” she says, spitting the words into Joani’s face. Joani winces. “I was a career woman, too. When your grandfather died I worked in the intimate apparel department at Cohen’s for twelve years. I was the best saleslady they had. All the Jewish ladies came in and said, ‘I want Doris Ianelli, that Italian. She’s the best saleslady in the store.’ Now all they got in that place is cheap junk. Ever since the P.R.’s moved in.”

  “P.R.’s” is my grandmother’s code for Puerto Ricans, who according to her are the primary reason why Leicester, the old city next door, “got bad” and why, after sixty-nine years there, she had to “get out,” just like all the other “good ones.” When she gets on the subject of the P.R.’s, I usually try to steer the conversation away, especially if Joani is around.

  “Maybe if Brenda and Frankie get married, she’ll learn to cook,” I say offhandedly.

  “I pray to God every night,” she says.

  “So do I,” says Joani, out of nowhere. I look up at her, but she’s pulled the sheet up over her head. I wonder if this is true. Brenda doesn’t go to church anymore, and I pretend to, but I really sneak along a book and go sit inside Dunkin’ Donuts for an hour. Joani still goes with our parents or with Grandma when she’s visiting, but it never occurred to me that she might take it any more seriously than we do. I picture her lying in her little twin bed, praying, and for some reason the idea depresses the hell out of me. Then suddenly it’s one of the contemptuous thoughts about my family I feel guilty for having, and I squash it up in my mind and throw it away.

  “Good. You should,” my grandmother says firmly, then, “Do you say the prayer I taught you to say before you made your First Communion?”

  Joani doesn’t answer. Instead, she sticks her head out from under the sheet and asks my grandmother, “Will you tell me the pressha cooka story?”

  “You wanna hear the pressha cooka story, honey?”

  “Yeah,” Joani says.

  The pressure cooker story is a story Grandma has told us about a hundred times. It’s about how once her pressure cooker, filled with a boiled dinner, exploded, and when she walked into the kitchen, meat and vegetables were dripping from the ceiling and walls. She can’t remember exactly when the incident took place, but I’ve dated it to about 1963, just after the Kennedy assassination. I have no reason to believe it never happened, because not once have the details of the story changed in the telling; my grandmother even remembers the exact contents of the pressure cooker and how long it took her to scour down the kitchen before the company arrived: fifty-three minutes flat. Apparently she foresaw that this would one day be a great story of will and perseverance, so she timed it. Joani finds this story hysterical and even likes to tell it along with my grandmother.

  “For our twenty-fifth anniversary, your grandfather gave me—” Grandma begins, ceding to Joani.

  “A pressha cooka!” Joani screams, exploding in laughter.

  “Uh-huh. A pressha cooka. I was the first one in the Sodality to get one, and Mary Trotta comes up to me and says—”

  And says, “Doris Ianelli, are you gettin’ snobby with us, goin’ an’ gettin’ a pressha cooka?” I say to myself, slipping out the door. I go into my room to pull up the shades and notice the T-shirt I was wearing last night, pizza-sauce stains blotted to pink across the chest. Now the night comes back to me with a little quickening of the heart; the exact transactions of that strange conversation have already blurred, swirling into the vortex of the final exchange, and I’m appalled at the clarity with which my own strained cadence comes back to me: I’m seventeen. In the bright light of my bedroom, in the familiar light of my own house, with my grandmother’s ancient voice rasping from the other room, the whole memory seems unreal now and eerily exotic: a rich black guy with that Public Radio voice, dropping phrases in French and Italian in the middle of a sub shop, those glowing loafers and attenuated hands. And something unseemly at the center of it, one incongruity to outstrip all other incongruities. It has nothing to do with me, I think, certainly nothing to do with this house, this family, and nothing to do with the light of day.

  * * *

  Coming down the stairs, I hear them fighting.

  First my mother: “How goddamned dumb can you be? Didn’t you listen to the doctor? Aren’t you up with the times?”

  Then Brenda: “Don’t you call me fuckin’ dumb!”

  “You use that kind of language around this house, young lady, and you can get the hell out and get your own place with your prison guard. See if I care.”

  “You would! You would care! That’s just it! You try to come off to me like you’re Miss Oh-I-Don’t-Care-About-What-People-Think, but you’re so brainwashed by the Catholic church, it’d drive you crazy.”

  “You’re gonna hate yourself when you’re putting me in the ground in a few weeks, you little brat.”

  “Good morning?” I say tentatively when I walk into the kitchen, and they both stop screaming.

  “Good morning, honey,” my mother says mechanically, her back to me, still in a nightgown, tossing a huge salad in a bowl.

  “Hi, Eric,” Brenda mumbles into her coffee cup. She looks ghastly this morning, bereft of her usual moussed-up hair and foundation-mascara-blusher-et-cetera face. She’s wearing the same oversized West Mendhem High Krimson Warriors football sweatshirt she inherited from Frank three years ago when they graduated, so it’s impossible to see if she’s starting to get big. Her legs are in tight acid-washed jeans up on one of the kitchen chairs, and I can see the bottoms of her feet are dirty from walking around the house barefoot. Her usual soft pack of Newport Menthol 100s is on the kitchen table, but she’s not smoking one at the moment, which is rare. On some level, Brenda respects me because I do well in school and she never did, and because I know a lot of big words. (In fact, she was the one who gave me my hated junior high school nickname, The Walking Dictionary.) But on a more common level, she pretends to care as little about my opinion of her as she does about the rest of the world’s, and that seems to be the mood she’s in this morning.

  “What time did you get in last night?” she asks me, indifferently. “I saw your light on when I got in.”

  “I got in around eleven,” I say, pouring a cup of coffee at the counter and resisting a paranoid instinct to glance around and assess the look on her face. “I was up reading.”

  “Did you go out with Phoebe or Charlie after work last night?” my mother asks, back still to us.

  “No. I had to stay late closing up the shop. Phoebe went to a concert at Great Woods and Charlie’s just getting back from drum camp today. They might come by later.”

  “That’s nice,” my mother says placidly, even though I know she’s adopting this placid tone just to annoy Brenda. “You know you don’t need to come right back with the car after work, Eric, as long as you call to let us know you’ll be late. You know that we trust you.”

  Brenda slams her fist down on the kitchen table and whips her head toward my mother’s back. “Oh my God! I know you say those things to Eric just to piss me off!”

  Big, theatrical, Why-do-I-deserve-this? sigh from my mother. “I say what kinds of things, Brenda?”

  Brenda clutches the edge of the kitchen table and screams, her bloodshot eyes about to burst out of her head. In the den, I hear the steady rhythm of my father turning the pages of the newspaper over the drone of the baseball game. The louder the house gets, the calmer he becomes, and I’ve long since stopped waiting for the day when he explodes.

  “Those kinds of things, Teresa,” she says, calling my mother by her full name, which my mother hates. “When you say something nice to Eric, but you’re really taking a stab at me.”

  Finally, my mother wheels around, brandishing her huge wooden salad fork at Brenda. “Do you know what you are?” she says to Brenda. “You’re a paranoid schizophrenic. That’s the only conclusion I can draw
. You think the whole world is out to get you, but you bring it on yourself!”

  “If I’m a paranoid schizophraniac,” Brenda mispronounces, “it’s your fault. You’re the one that always made me feel like a freak.”

  My mother laughs sharply and rolls her eyes, hand on hip. “Oh, really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “How?”

  “Oh my God! How can you ask how? Through my whole friggin’ life! What about when I picked out that First Communion dress with Auntie Irene and you told me I looked like a marshmallow in it?”

  I laugh now, snorting up some coffee. I can’t help it. I’ve seen Brenda’s First Communion pictures: she’s an overweight seven-year-old in a frothy white crinolined confection that fits her like a powdered zeppole, a ring of crushed daisies falling off her head as she scowls at the camera in front of St. Agnes’s church.

  “Oh, fuck you, Eric!” she spits at me. “I’ve seen your First Communion picture, and you look like a little skinny wussy-boy!” I laugh again. She’s right; there I am, in a polyester navy blazer and polyester chinos that ride halfway up my arms and legs, hair plastered to my head in a side part and over my ears, smiling dewily like an oversuckled mama’s boy.

  “Come off it, Brenda,” my mother says. “I never said you looked like a marshmallow. I said you looked like a pretty little cream puff.”

  “No you didn’t! I remember you saying, right in front of Grandma and Auntie Irene, ‘Doesn’t she look like a marshmallow? Couldn’t you just gobble her—gobble her up?’” Brenda’s voice breaks here, and I recoil. I’ve heard that break before, and it usually means she’s going to cry, which is always a tough thing to witness in a hard-ass like my sister.

  Now my mother is ashamed. “Honey, I never said that,” she says flatly, turning back to the salad. “But you remember what you want.”

  But it’s too late. Brenda tears her hands through her hair and emits a long prefatory creaking sound before she erupts into full-blown sobs. “And now I’m gonna start looking like a marshmallow all over again!”