by Matt Stewart
Terror is nothing other than prompt, severe, inflexible justice.
—Maximilien Robespierre
On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, after a day of sitting around while frightened teachers whispered into cellphones in the hall, a day in which mysterious televisions materialized from closets and broadcasted the same catastrophic images and humbled voices over and over, an absentee day of independent textbook review and worksheets and extended recess, Marat set off a pile of M-80s in the boys’ room and a smoke bomb in the teachers’ lounge and ran down the hallway screaming like a freshly scalped prairie woman until an assistant principal took him out with a shoestring tackle.
Two weeks later, upon completion of a wriggling, energy-blasted, house-wrecking suspension, Fanny informed him that he was no longer permitted to leave the house without first performing one hundred sit-ups and one hundred push-ups, in front of the fireplace, naked. “Marat, I am sorry that it has come to this,” she explained in a judicious voice. “But how else are we to get through to you that this is unacceptable? We are fortunate you were not shot on the spot. Exercise and shame are required to put you back in line.”
Marat smirked and shrugged. “I was just trying to, you know, make a joke.”
“You have grown too chubby and yet retain too much pointless energy. An exercise regimen will take the edge off and trim off that fat,” Fanny explained. “And the nudity will serve as motivation to end your shaming and behave better.”
“What if I don’t do it?” he barked.
“You will experience a pain you have never known,” Fanny said sweetly, receding into the hallway, the divot in her forehead deep enough to hide a quarter.
The next morning, Marat and Robespierre crammed toast into their mouths, kissed Esmerelda goodbye, and made a coordinated break for the door while Fanny was in the bathroom with her third cigarette of the morning. As they grappled with the complex array of locks, Fanny strolled toward them laughing. “Children,” she wheezed, “I may have been born at night, but not last night. Now Marat, strip!”
“Hold the phone, Ma,” Esmerelda piped up, unaware of her son’s new exercise requirements. “Not cool.”
“Silence, dear. Would you prefer to sleep on the street? Marat, please, get to it.”
“I ain’t kidding, Ma!” Esmerelda rattled her cereal spoon menacingly. “Lay off the kid!”
“Esmerelda Van Twinkle, I have had enough out of you. The boy committed a terrorist act. He does not respond to grounding. He does not respond to child psychologists. He does not respond to the rescinding of television privileges. Perhaps he will respond to physical exertion and embarrassment. Enough squabbling, Marat, drop them!”
Fanny jerked down Marat’s sagging jeans to reveal his bare, fleshy bottom, and spanked him with her open palm. “Hit the deck,” Fanny ordered, “now!”
Marat aimed his decimated pupils at his grandmother and inched open his lips. Quietly but clearly he hissed:
“Fuck.
“You.”
The ensuing blast took him to the ground and into a nap. He woke up in bed, pants refastened around his waist, a drag race roaring in his head. And for the rest of his life, through his adolescent revenge and adult regret, he always believed that it was his grandmother who’d laid the haymaker on him. She was the offended party, already steamed up, well within striking distance, with a track record of screwing him over. Even though Robespierre insisted that it was their mother who’d risen from her chair like a viper and hurled her breakfast plate across the room at him, eggs and bacon splattering across walls as the porcelain pigeon clocked him in the forehead, he refused to accept it—it didn’t make sense. For he had divined, correctly, that Fanny Van Twinkle had cracked.
Even with a daughter and two grandchildren at home, Fanny felt a dearth of love so penetrating that she found her only moments of warmth from her daily slate of soap operas. They provided her with reliable attention, featuring juicy love triangles with handsome men who commanded large fortunes and cogently discussed world events, scripted into trustworthy hour-long blocks and timed for predictable commercial breaks. Whereas her home life had descended into Hobbesian chaos: Marat, the nasty one, Esmerelda brutish; and Robespierre—her one hope, the girl—unbearably short.
What went wrong with Robespierre? Already she had taken to issuing orders and ignoring advice, a subtle dictatorship, her understated disgust at Fanny’s copious and free home cooking ticking Fanny off in a major way; and she was condescending, with an enormous vocabulary Fanny couldn’t decode. “That meal was really dyspeptic,” she announced after Fanny prepared her classic fava bean casserole. “Thank you,” Fanny replied, thrilled to have earned such an unusual compliment. A stupid, elated grin stuck to her face for the next few hours, until Esmerelda asked what was making her so freakin’ silly, and Fanny told her, and Esmerelda provided the definition. “Damn,” Fanny growled, her smile vaporized, “that girl has too much peacock in her strut.”
Fanny cleaned, she cooked, she shopped, she mended. She tried to help with homework and occasionally took a shot at physical contact: a handshake, a high-five, dipping in for a hug once a year. But her daughter was sullen, Marat cold, and Robespierre a goody two-shoes too calculating to be seen sucking up. The isolation was total. And yet despite the complaints, the animosity, and the resultant marginalization, Fanny never seriously considered that she might have been too rigid in her contract enforcement, too persnickety about the little things, particularly with regard to the boy’s clothing options, and that the girl was only doing what she could to increase her general popularity among the household, to build her political capital.
And Harold wasn’t coming back. She knew this. There was no secret rescue mission or mystery vortex or explanation for his absence other than a boiling sea, swirling rain, nautical collisions, gale winds, and bone-crushing waves. At least he had gone with the ocean. It was where he belonged, she thought, and when it stormed against her bedroom window she imagined his body banded with water and drizzling back to her as rain. Her love, trickling through her flowerpots; her love, leaking between her shingles. Her love filling her stomach when she drank from the tap. As the younger generations quickly figured out, Fanny fell apart during storms.
She was lonely. She heard the rain but could not kiss it. She drank her husband’s love but could not feel it.
Her mind was melting with love.
“Gramma?” Robespierre was at her knee.
“Wha?”
“You were yelling in your sleep.”
“I was?”
“Yes.”
“What was I saying?”
“‘Batten down the hatches! Storm coming!’ You said that over and over again. And you yelled a bunch too.”
“Well. Too much pizza before naptime I suppose.”
“Really?”
“No.” Her face flinched, nearly a laugh, and she privately reveled in her superior handle on sarcasm.
“This naked exercise thing, Gramma. It’s stupid,” Robespierre declared. “And wrong.”
Fanny’s sinuses churned. “It is my house, dear. And in my house, you must obey my rules.”
“Your rules are stupid,” Robespierre said simply. “They’re just getting everybody mad at you.”
“And how do you expect me to react, Robespierre?” Fanny’s skin was orange, her hands shivering crabs. “You helped your brother disobey my rules; you are no better than him.”
Robespierre glided back toward her room, soundlessly unpacking comebacks. Already she knew she was far better than her brother in nearly everything. “Cool it, Gramma,” she said as she climbed the stairs. “We’re all you have left, and you should treat us better.”
Fanny sat back in her husband’s recliner and did not move. She did not chide the children to turn off the cartoons they watched on the wood-paneled television set that sat on the living room floor; she did not return her daughter’s perfunctory “Hey, Ma,” when she came home at 5:30. She did not
make dinner. She did not react to Esmerelda’s queries as to what in the heck was shaking, how was the boob tube treating her, was there any chance she’d be cooking up some food in the near future or what. The sun set, and she sat alone in the dark while they ordered Chinese, the kids trundled up to bed, Esmerelda took her nightly shower and plunked onto her double-king mattress. Fanny sat with her eyes open and watched the wall, watched the window, watched the shadows droop across the street, watched the past fade into oblivion.
At 5 AM she rose from her chair, went to the kitchen, and warmed herself some mu shu pork. Then she drank a beer and went to sleep, leaving the dishes dirty, lunches unpacked, the kids sleeping through their alarm clocks, her daughter without someone to pull her muumuu over her mountainous body and help her out the door. In early afternoon she got up and walked to the beach, through the fog, to the sea. She took off her clothes and waded into the water. Harold’s cold wet kiss lapped at her ankles, her knees, her thighs. He wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her toward him, his stubble against her cheeks, his breath on her neck. She longed to be touched, to be his wife, and she let him run his hands through her hair and rub her back and blow bubbles in her ear. They made love softly, rolling in the waves, until she fell asleep.
She awoke on the beach, fists pounding her chest. “She’s up, dudes!” a voice called.
Salt water spilled from her mouth. “Fuck-a-doodle-doo,” the voice said. “Hang on, lady, ambulance on the way.”
Ice locked up her muscles. She had lost him.
She pushed herself up and walked silently through the pack of surfers, dog walkers, dogs, joggers, and kite flyers, over the dunes and back across the Great Highway to her house. She sat naked in the kitchen drinking gin until the liquor was gone and Harold was gone and there was nothing to do but lie down and die.
But in the morning she found herself in her own bed, dressed in a nightgown and covered in quilts, both grandchildren huddled beside her. “Is this hell?” she screamed. Marat opened an eye and shook his head. “Is there a reason you people refuse to let me die and be done with it? Why the tricks? Save yourself the time and trouble; please, let me go!”
Robespierre crawled up the bed and pushed her lips against Fanny’s ear. “I love you, Gramma. I don’t want you to go.” And then she began to cry.
For the rest of her bewildered life, Fanny Van Twinkle spent her days uncoiled across Harold’s old leather armchair, watching her soaps, offering unsolicited negative opinions, never leaving the house, transmitting devil rays across the universe. She brushed her teeth with gin and spat blood on the carpet, murmuring her wedding vows over and over again.
Yet before she descended into the lair of madness where she would reside the rest of her days—so Robespierre’s attorneys argued—Fanny revised her last will and testament. She transferred assignments, swapped out names; the total text was shortened considerably. After the executors compared drafts and the legal battles wound themselves out, the list of losers ran as long as Esmerelda’s beefy arm, superseded by a lone winner atop the pile, the last words of love Fanny Van Twinkle ever heard reverberating as far into the future as she could make them.
Until then: anger, brutality, callousness. Shallow tirades and vituperation, frequently matched by howling. More than anything, insults—ad hominem, abstract, accurate, fantastic. The invective exploded from Fanny’s lips.
“Get off me, you brazen twat,” she said to her sobbing granddaughter. “Expect me to believe your bullshit? I have seen enough to know the games you play. Go find another fool to swindle, and take that criminal down there with you.” She kneed Marat in the chest. “Move it, leave. You have done enough, now give me my quiet.” She rolled onto her side. “That is all I have to say.”
The children ran to their mother’s bed and jumped on her mattress, trilling wretched screams. They’d seen the glint in Fanny’s eye and knew something was big-time wrong, sensed it like dogs sense narcotics and women sense fertilization. Employing a mix of snack incentives and hysterical pleading, they got Esmerelda vertical and up the stairs, entering the bedroom as Fanny hung up the phone with her lawyer, Robespierre’s words melting like snowflakes but lingering just long enough for the changes to go through.
Esmerelda’s heaves filled the room. “Kids, get me some water! And a towel, while you’re at it.” She wiped sweat off her face with her nightgown and took three uneasy steps toward the bed. “Ma, what gives? The naked push-ups crap, all the lying around nude. For Chrissakes, ‘twat’? How’m I supposed to define that one, huh? HA-RONK! So much gin, Ma, that ain’t healthy. And our contract—shite, it’s not workin’ out for nobody. I can’t afford a three-bedroom house with Slippy’s money, you’ve seen the prices. What’s the point anyway? Our contract probably ain’t legal, and anyhow we’re gonna keep on changing, like it or not. Kids do nothin’ but change. At first I thought it might be nice, all of us holed up together, the kids getting to know their Gramma, and us, maybe, getting to know each other too, as adults. But it’s more like prison, and you’re the warden. Can’t you ratchet down the crazy bit and let life move along?”
Fanny propped herself up on her pillows and took a look at her daughter. They had the same upturned nose, and those were Harold’s bean eyes, but the rest of her was a big hill of horse manure that she wanted nothing to do with ever again. “Listen to me, fat ass. I can’t deal with your shit. You’re obese and lazy and underachieving. You’ve ruined yourself with that dead-end job, and now you’re ruining the children. And all you do is waddle around and stuff your face and blame it on your cake holiday ten years ago.” A chemical extract pooled in her mouth, and she wiped her tongue with the hem of her quilt. “Every couple years you say you’re gonna slim down, and then you backslide. Remember that Christmas you took a walk with the kids and told everyone you were gonna be a size 6 in two years? Remember how the next day you ate half a ham by yourself? Grow up, Esmerelda. And get the hell out of my room.”
For a minute no one moved. Partially because Esmerelda was exhausted, but mostly it was the unexpected venom, the rampant use of contractions, the frontal attack on Esmerelda’s constitution. How Fanny spoke the truth, a meadow tipped with frozen dew. Robespierre brought her mother a plastic cup of water and Esmerelda drained it with her eyes fixed on Fanny’s face, her slow eyes, her brindled hair, her assured chin. Then she hobbled to the door and left, the kids followed her, and Fanny was finally alone.
Marat broke into his mother’s ledger, a dusty cloth-covered tome lined with miniscule figures. Assorted accounts contained just enough to put a down payment on a three-bedroom house out in the Excelsior, not the nicest part of town but starting to gentrify, within city limits and close enough to McLaren Park to fulfill the contract requirements, with a little left over for furnishings, a housewarming party, maybe a used vehicle. “And that’s thinking conservatively, a standard thirty-year mortgage with 20 percent down,” he groused to his sister as they strategized in her room. “So many other options these days; she’s not even trying. What’s the deal?”
“Grandma’s all she’s got left that’s familiar. It’s hard to get past her.”
“Grandma’s bad.”
“Grandma’s a problem,” Robespierre decided. “She hates all this anyway. We gotta do something.” And like that it was settled that Fanny Van Twinkle’s vestigial presence would be removed like an orange highway cone, picked off the asphalt and tossed into the back of the truck. As time dripped by, the idea gestated from vague concept to firm belief to actionable plan with a timeline and budget and elaborate web of deniability, all the anticipated variables plotted out, horoscopes and travel schedules taken into consideration, crafted with elegance and care. The only thing missing was the courage to execute, the shove over the mountaintop and into the irreversible wild, which eventually came along in the form of one of Marat’s fellow detention-goers, a spoiled Vietnamese kid named Duc who gave Marat his first dime bag and Marley’s Legend CD and put the kid in a place
of peace.
On a midsummer afternoon in 2004, Marat took three rips from a pocket bong and tiptoed toward Fanny’s recliner. She was snoring heavily over soap opera dialogue, her face undulating with the flow of oxygen, rising and falling, a rippling circus tent, until he touched her slipper and she gurgled awake. She frowned, unaccustomed to personal contact and suspecting chicanery. “Whatcha got there, swamp water? Where’s Ezzie?”
He handed her a glass filled with brackish liquid. “Iced tea,” he said. “I made it. Robespierre took mom out shopping. Now drink up. I’ve got a surprise.”
Fanny glared at the glass shaking in her hand, growing increasingly leery of her first grandchild-delivered beverage in years. “What is it?”
“I was thinking we could go out,” Marat suggested. “Do a little sightseeing.”
“Really,” she said. “What do you have in mind?”
“I don’t know. Where would you like to go?”
Her first time out of the house in years. An opening. She thanked him with a slight softening of her eyes. “The Golden Gate Bridge?” she suggested. “Is it a nice day for a walk?”
“Not really,” Marat said. “It’s pretty gloomy out. The view would stink.”
“That’s too bad,” Fanny said, her words lugubrious, her fantasy exit crushed.
“But the zoo’s open today,” he said. “I haven’t been in years. Let’s do that. The zoo.”
She wanted to hate him for the brief remainder of her life. She hated him as he helped her into her overcoat and walked her down the street to the bus stop; she hated him as he paid her fare and collected her transfer, as he smiled and talked about how in history class they were studying the French Revolution, the Jacobins and Napoleon, his namesake Jean-Paul Marat, distracting external wars, some stupid pendulum swinging back and forth between right wing and left. She hated that although it was foggy the zoo was not wet, it was not nautical, it was not architectural brilliance spanning churning teal seawater blocked off by a puny four-foot fence.
