Of course, she meant that The Call of the Wild book. The saga of some animal implanted with radioactive chimpanzee embryos from the Crab Nebula. If I’d chosen that Jack London book we’d all still be alive. Even with my eyes shut I’d picked the wrong option. I told her, “Bank robbery?” I said, “I loved that chapter.”
Nana Minnie’s chin tilted up a little, lifting her eyes off the road a smidge. She stared in the rearview mirror, watching the bright toilet crime scene shrinking from a real place, smaller and smaller, until it was just another night star. She said, “How about the part where the dog sees the crazy person murder the old fella in cold blood?” She asked, “Have you got that far?”
Our headlights zoomed ahead, skimming over a stretch of upstate highway, and I watched the steady horizon without giving her any answer. Instead, I imagined peaches, apricots, cherries, tomatoes, beans, even watermelon pickles preserved in clear glass bottles. Sapphire pink and ruby red and emerald green juices. A treasury of food, this bounty steeped in too much sugar or too much salt, to keep bacteria from setting up shop. My Nana Minnie had blanched, boiled, and canned a long future of meals for her and Papadaddy, and now it was only her. The best way to support her would be to help her eat. Maybe between the pair of us we could justify all those years of peeling and coring.
My nana asked, “You know, I always felt sorry for that collie dog.” She said, “If that dog could’ve just told the truth, you know, folks would’ve still loved it.”
Whatever she was talking about, it was no book I’d been reading. Instead of answering her with more lies I sagged my head to one side on a limp neck. My hands snuggled in my chinchilla pockets. My eyes drifted shut and I made a fast snore like I was asleep, only it sounded more like I was just reading the word snore off a thousand cue cards.
Nana Minnie said, “Everybody knew that collie dog was just defending herself,” but then she had to take a break from talking in order to catch up on her coughing. For my part, the car was jam-packed with everything I didn’t want to say. If my nana was going to be hurt, I wouldn’t be the person to do it.
I couldn’t spit out my secret any easier than she could cough up her tumor.
At the hospital she pretended to wake me, and I pretended to be groggy, mostly blinking my eyes and acting out yawns. One unintended outcome was that we’d no doubt have to hold a funeral, and my parents would have to come. They’d have to collect me and take me away with them, and that rescue seemed almost worth killing someone for. We walked, me and my nana holding hands, up a hospital sidewalk and into bright light behind sliding glass doors. The linoleum floor was waxed so shiny it seemed as bright as the fluorescent ceiling, and the waiting room seemed sandwiched between these two forms of light. There, she left me to sit with the magazines, in a hard-plastic chair that would’ve been avocado-chic in Oslo but in upstate read as just plain shabby. Among the magazines were three old issues of Cat Fancy with me cuddling my kitten, Tigerstripe, on the cover. Poor Tigerstripe. Beginning with People, Vogue, and Time, I began to leaf through every copy in search of scenes from my other life. My real life.
Suddenly, I worried my papadaddy might be alive in a bed nearby, tubed to a saggy, hanging-down bag of secondhand blood, laughing and eating Jell-O as he told the nursing staff how his roly-poly, spoiled-rotten grandbaby had tried to hack off his wiener when all he’d been doing was playing her a practical joke. Then I heard a police officer walk past saying the words “hate crime” to a doctor, and I guessed I was in the clear.
Within my earshot the officer said how my grandpa’s wallet, watch, and wedding ring were missing, and I fumed that someone would rob an old man lying dead on a toilet floor. It’s true I’d killed him. That goes without saying. But I was his Baby Bean Sprout. That made it different. From their talk it was clear the police didn’t have anything right. It irked me to let their theories stay so totally wrong, but there was no pressing reason my nana had to be a widow and know she’d outlived a sex pervert.
No one said anything about finding my dropped euros and rubles soaked in blood, or about finding my busted eyeglasses or the dagger of shattered glass from the tea jar. The policeman said, “Insane thrill killer.”
The doctor said, “Ritual mutilation.” Suggesting space aliens, I hoped.
The policeman let slip with, “Satanic cult.”
All along I thought they were bad-mouthing my Papadaddy Ben, but then I realized they meant me. At best they were referring to some crazed, at-large killer, but that was still me, sitting here in my bunny slippers and fur coat. Just by being a dead body with no wallet or blood, his wiener half torn off, that made my grandpa the innocent injured party. It didn’t seem fair. Yes, it hurt to have authority figures call me a “sadistic bastard,” but if I tried to defend myself I’d wind up in the electric chair, and that wasn’t going to improve the situation for my nana. Or help my already unruly, flyaway hair.
Gentle Tweeter,
It was at papadaddy’s funeral that I noticed my nana started to cough in a new, more intrusive way. Among infants, one might cry, but another will cough to attract loving attention. Other babies will drink vodka and gobble down illicit drugs. Other babies will date abusive men. Or overeat. Even negative attention beats ending up some Baltic orphan ignored in a crib, warehoused in a forgotten ward filled with castoff urchins. Coughing through Papadaddy Ben’s funeral, coughing and hacking at the graveside, this was my nana’s bid for sympathy. I never dreamed she’d escalate her emotional neediness all the way to cancer.
Despite my pleadings, my parents didn’t come upstate for the memorial service. They contracted for a video crew with a satellite truck that narrowcast the event in real time to their home in Tenerife. The paparazzi, however, flocked to attend. The New York Post ran the headline “Dad of Star Found Dead in Toilet Torture.”
In lieu of flowers or sympathy cards, my mother sent my nana and me lavish gift baskets of Xanax.
Each time the telephone rang I expected the police to call me in for death by lethal injection. For the funeral, I wore a black Gucci veil over black Foster Grants. I wore a stroller-length vintage Blackglama junior mink and black gloves, just in case some crafty sleuth would attempt to acquire my fingerprints from the communion rail. To answer CanuckAIDSemily, little Emily, the actual church was a rustic clapboard structure where a dead body did not seem out of place, juxtaposed as it was with paper plates of peanut-butter cookies. The congregants seemed genuinely distressed by Papadaddy’s tragic demise, and they displayed their aboriginal upstate empathy by presenting me with a gift: a book. Unlike the Beagle book or the Call of the Wild book, this tome was freshly printed, a new title, bound in handsome almost-leather. It seemed to be this summer’s beach read, for everyone present also carried a copy. Here was the moment’s mega–best seller, the Angela’s Ashes or Da Vinci Code du jour. A quick perusal suggested a postmodern work told from multiple viewpoints—very Kurosawa in structure—plot-driven, a sword-and-sandal epic filled with magic and dragons, sex and violence. I accepted it, their rustic offering of condolence, as graciously as my mother would an Oscar.
Printed in gold leaf along the spine was the title: The Bible.
As fanciful as anything penned by Tolkien or Anne Rice, this new tome presented an elaborate yarn about creation. In my heart, it would easily displace the Beagle book, with Mr. Darwin’s somewhat didactic nineteenth-century flavor. His saga depicted existence as a one-shot endeavor, a desperate struggle to endure and procreate. It’s no comfort when confronted by death to be assured that you’re merely some flawed variation of life reaching the end of its evolutionary blind alley. Whereas the Beagle book depicted a narrative of death after death, endless adaptation and failure—all history literally glued together with sperm and blood—the Bible book promised a happy life everlasting.
Survival of the fittest versus survival of the nicest.
Which author, Gentle Tweeter, would you choose to read at bedtime?
This homespun church even held a weekly book club to discuss their newest literary sensation. To present the book, these simple upstate denizens coaxed forward a young boy child. As I was leaving the church with my nana, this darling towhead stumbled forth from their patchwork ranks. In both hands before him he carried this Bible book, and to my world-weary, eleven-year-old eyes he appeared an earnest sort, clad in his freshly laundered rags, a minor player destined to milk cows and sire similar agrarian laborers and ultimately die in not-undeserved obscurity, the probable victim of some future combine mishap. He, a rural David Copperfield, and I, a glamorous globetrotting fashion plate, we appeared to both be the same tender age. Some brutish farmwife pushed him toward me with her calloused hand, saying, “Give it to the poor girly, Festus.”
That was his name, Festus. He placed the book in my black-gloved palms.
While I was not immediately smitten, Festus did pique my romantic curiosity. A spark, most likely statically electric in nature, jumped between his person and mine, so strong that I felt the tiny shock through my elegant hand-wear. I accepted his gift with a simple nod and a murmur of gratitude. Feigning emotional distress, I pretended to collapse against him, and his sturdy farm urchin’s arms caught my fall. In our clinch, Festus’s prepubescent hands seized me bodily; only the Bible book lay between the full contact of our sensitive groin areas.
Festus, holding me an instant, whispered, “The Good Book will sustain you, Miss Madison.”
And, yes, Gentle Tweeter, Festus was an uncouth primitive, fragrant with the poultry manure lodged beneath his fingernails, but he did use the word sustain.
Ye gods. I was thrilled. “Au revoir,” I breathlessly bade my hardy swain. “Until we meet in…” I covertly checked the book’s title. “… in ‘Bible’ study.”
His ardent child’s lips whispered, “Fierce wristwatch…”
And from that moment forward I was putty in the young farm laborer’s hands. My fertile mind immediately began to spin romantic scenarios set in his world of subsistence agriculture. Together, we would scratch our daily bread from the hardscrabble upstate landscape, and our love would be the unvarnished stuff of a Robert Frost poem.
For comfort after the funeral, Nana Minnie had baked apple tarts and Bundt cake with lemon drizzle and apricot flan. Spiced crumb cake, maple bars, cherry grunt, peach cobbler, pear Betty, raisin slump, coconut crisp, walnut pandowdy, cinnamon buckle, plum trifle, and hazelnut fool. She built pyramids of pecan sandies on plates. Platters of gingersnaps and shortbreads. Busy frosting cupcakes and glazing doughnuts, she wasn’t much more of a widow than she’d been before. You never know the complicated deals two people negotiate in order to stay married beyond the first ten minutes. It could be she knew about Papadaddy’s traffic island antics. For my part I found the Jack London book on the parlor shelf and carried it back to my bedroom with a plate of cupcakes and read it, waiting for the chimpanzee embryos. By the middle of the novel I decided that what two people don’t say to each other forges a stronger bond than honesty.
Nana’s strawberry cupcakes were bribing me not to tell the truth. It might be the cupcakes were punishment for my lies. On my nana’s farm you could see only as far away as the next tree. That made it hard to think of the future. Any future.
Not the day of my papadaddy’s funeral, not the day after, not even the day after that, but a week after the funeral I was still eating. My Nana Minnie broke eggs, poured milk from a paper carton, knifed a yellow square of butter off a plate she took from the refrigerator. She sprinkled flour. Coughed. Spooned sugar. Coughed. Showing me all of the terrible things that go into making food: vegetable oil, yeast, vanilla extract, she dialed the oven temperature and ladled foamy batter into muffin tins, coughing the words, “When your mama was your age she was always bringing home head lice….”
Nana Minnie told her life backward while she cooked, reciting details like ingredients. Like how my mother used to wet her bed. How one time my mom ate cat poop and Nana pulled a tapeworm as long as a spaghetti out of her bottom. Even that image didn’t stop my eating.
She went on—at length—about how my mother had bought a lottery ticket and won the fortune that was to be her grubstake as an aspiring movie actor.
At night, the Beagle book stuffed between my mattress and box spring made sleep impossible. I’d lie awake with the book’s lump lodged in my spine, certain the local district attorney would knock at my bedroom door to serve a search warrant. The investigators would grill me under a bare lightbulb, insisting they’d found several words printed in reverse on my papadaddy’s dead wiener, printed backward in mirror writing. It was obvious those words had rubbed off or been transferred from the murder weapon. Those words were the fingerprints they needed to convict a suspect. The reverse words included Wollaston, wigwam, guanaco, Goeree, Fuegians, scurvy, and, most damning of all, Beagle. A team of police goons would toss the bedroom and discover the stashed book.
In the rare event I drifted off, my dead Papadaddy Ben would roll a hot-dog vendor’s pushcart into the room and serve me boiled kielbasas smothered in sauerkraut and blood. Or a plate of steaming cat poop tapeworms smothered in marinara sauce.
As bad as any nightmare, one day my nana was sorting dirty laundry and came into the kitchen carrying something blue. I was seated at the kitchen table eating a cheesecake. Not a slice of cheesecake—I was paddling with a fork, halfway across an ocean of cheesecake, not tasting a bite, I was cramming it down so fast. Open on the kitchen table was the Bible book. I stopped reading and chewing, midswallow, when I saw my blue chambray shirt wadded in her hands, and I worked hard not to gag.
Not that I actually chewed my food. The way I ate, it was more like the reverse of vomiting.
Poised in my face, as close as the next hovering forkful of cheesecake, were the mysterious dried sputum spatters. Her face bland and guileless, my nana asked, “Raindrop?” She coughed the words, “Can you remember what’s this mess so I know how to pretreat it?”
First, I wasn’t sure I actually knew. Second, I was sure she wouldn’t want to know. Edging my tasty cheesecake away from the moldy, yellowing blotches, I said, “Dijon mustard.”
To my horror, Nana lifted the crumpled fabric near her face, peering close. She scratched at a crusted patch with her fingernail, saying, “It don’t smell nothing like mustard….” The scratched spot sprinkled down specks like powdered dust. Specks landed on my fork. On my unfinished pan of cheesecake. Nana Minnie brought the besmirched shirt closer to her face and reached toward it with the tentative point of her tongue.
“It’s not mustard!” I shouted. My fork clattered to the kitchen floor. I stood so quickly my chrome chair teetered and fell over behind me. The crash brought my nana’s full attention to my face. I said, calmly now, “It’s not mustard.”