She stared, her tongue pulled safely back inside her mouth.
“It’s sneeze,” I said.
She asked, “Sneeze?”
I’d needed to cover a sneeze, I explained. No tissues were at hand, so I’d been forced to use my shirt.
My nana’s shocked, round eyes surveyed the sizable Galápagos archipelago of stiff deposits. “This is all your boogers?” she asked, as if I were the person about to die of some gruesome cigarette-induced chest condition.
I shrugged. I’d stopped caring. As long as I didn’t hurt her, I would let her think I was a dirty, disgusting animal. I was eleven years old and bloating like a blue-ribbon sow.
As if on cue she coughed, and coughed and kept on coughing, embarrassed and hiding her red face behind the knot of blue shirt still in her hands. Coughs that rattled like Papadaddy Ben hawking the tobacco spit from far down in his throat. The veins stood out in her neck like Darwin’s maps of major river systems. These were coughs so bad she couldn’t stop even when we both saw the bright red she was coughing all over the already-there dried sputum stains.
Between wiener juice and lung blood, I’d say that chambray shirt was a goner.
What I learned is, it’s never too late to save anybody. And it’s always too late. And what are the chances you’ll make any difference? And instead of declaring to my nana that her grandbaby was a liar and that her husband was an inverted sexual pervert and that her own movie-star daughter didn’t like her very much, instead I told her she made the best peanut-butter cheesecake in the whole wide world. And I held my empty plate up to her and begged for yet another helping.
Gentle Tweeter,
Late at night, in my upstate bed, I once again became the naturalist. Settling into sleep I sucked a sugary sweetness from under my fingernails, and stared up into the darkness where I knew the ceiling to be. And I listened. I listened and counted. I could always tell where my nana was—the kitchen, the parlor, her bedroom—by the sound of her coughing, like the regular call of a bird, but a sound both reassuring and terrible. That coughing. Those coughs. Simultaneously, they served as proof she was still alive, but that she wouldn’t be forever. Nights I learned to cling to the sound of each cough, each volley of hacking and wheezing, and to find comfort in the noise. Despite the hard lump of the Beagle book stabbing me in the back, I could eventually fall asleep with the Bible book open against my heart.
The same way people will count the seconds between lightning and thunder, I counted the seconds between coughs. One-alligator, two-alligator, three-alligator. Hoping the longer I could count the better Nana Minnie might feel. Hoping at least she’d fall asleep. If I could get to nine-alligator I’d tell myself that all she suffered was a chest cold. Maybe bronchitis, but something curable. By twenty-alligator I’d be dozing, seeing my dead, half-naked nightmare Papadaddy Ben claw at my blankets with bloody hands. But finally the coughs would come back, the choking and gasping for breath, so rapid I couldn’t squeeze even one alligator between them.
In bed, I sucked my fingers clean. My nana and I had been making popcorn balls all day, and the smell of popped corn filled the house. Did I say how the next day was Halloween? Well, this was the night before Halloween, and we’d been cooking popcorn balls to distribute to trick-or-treaters. Like offshore sweatshop laborers, we’d combined the popcorn with corn syrup and drops of orange food coloring, then shaped the corn in our buttered hands to make knobby miniature pumpkins. We’d pressed triangles of candy corn to make them orange-colored Jack-o’-lanterns with pointed eyes and vampire teeth. As packaging, we’d wrapped them in waxed paper.
And did I mention that I’d secretly laced all of our Halloween treats with my ample, unused supply of funeral Xanax? Well, waste not… I’d reasoned.
A cough came from my nana’s bedroom, and I counted: One-alligator… two-alligator…, but another cough came too fast. With the detachment of a Darwin I began to categorize the coughs by their qualities. Some rasped. Others gurgled wetly. A third type amounted to only a species of breathless hiss. It might’ve been the first cough of a baby learning to breathe, or the last failed breath of someone dying.
Listening closely, lying in bed, my fingertips tasted like buttered pancakes smothered in syrup. When the last cough came, I counted: One-Mississippi… two-Mississippi… three-Mississippi… until a new cough sent me all the way back to counting from zero.
My parents didn’t celebrate Christmas or Passover or Easter, but how they celebrated Halloween was compensation for a million ignored holidays. To my mom it was all about the costumes and adopting alternative archetypal personas, blah, blah, blah. My dad was even more boring on the subject, waxing on about the inversion of power hierarchies and subjugated children recast as outlaws in order to demand tribute from the prevailing hegemony of adults. They’d dress me as Simone de Beauvoir and parade me around the Ritz in Paris to beg for gender parity in the workplace and snack-size Hershey bars, but really to demonstrate their own political acumen. One year they dressed me as Martin Luther, and everyone I met asked whether I was supposed to be Bella Abzug. Grown-ups, fie!
In my upstate bed no coughs came for so long I’d counted up to sixteen-alligator, and I crossed two sticky fingers under the covers, hoping for luck. I considered, briefly, dressing as Charles Darwin this year, but didn’t want to have to explain myself on every hillbilly front porch in this tedious missing-link neighborhood.
I hit twenty-nine-alligator. I got to thirty-four-alligator.
The bedroom door swung open, soundlessly, and a withered hand reached toward me from the shadows in the hallway. A figure began to crawl into the room, desiccated and skeletal, its face a leering skull stained with tobacco juice. Instead of ghostly chains it dragged a silver belt buckle. One bony hand stretched forward, offering a long, dried dog boo-boo nestled in a hot-dog bun. The poo-poo log was garnished with a golden squiggle of Dijon mustard. This same monster I saw every night, or some version of it, and it came as good news lately, because it meant I’d finally fallen asleep. No more counting. I was having a nightmare, but I was asleep. It meant my nana had fallen asleep.
The bed that had once been my mother’s bed felt deep and soft. My nana had changed the sheets today, and these smelled airy and fresh from a sunny afternoon on the clothesline. Nothing hurt.
The cadaver of my Papadaddy Ben swam across the floor, its gabardine pants wadded around its anklebones. The grinning skull hissed, “Ye murderer!” And as it crept closer, the corpse left a trail of blood smeared on the floor behind it.
Nothing hurt.
As fast as a cough, the thought hit me: the Beagle book. I couldn’t feel it. The painful lump of it. The grinning monster of my dead papadaddy disappeared, and I was awake. Scrambling from under the blankets I found no blood on the floor. The door was shut. I plunged both arms under the mattress, all the way to my shoulders, and felt around. I found no book. I crawled along the bedside, feeling everywhere between the mattress and box spring, still no book. A nightmare beyond my worst nightmare. I knelt beside the bed and prayed to still be asleep and only dreaming. Not that I believed in God back then, but I’d seen my mom play a pious nun in a film one time, and her character had spent half her screen time on her knees muttering demands into clasped hands.
When pretending to pray didn’t work, I tiptoed out of my room, down the hallway, to the bookshelf in the parlor. In the dim light I finger-walked from spine to spine, and here it was: The Voyage of the Beagle. It was making the other books stand tight again, stuck back in the place where I’d first found it, looking the same as if nothing had ever happened. As if every gory detail of the past weeks had taken place in a dream. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t pull it from the shelf, because I didn’t want to open it and find the bloody wiener-shaped reality. Because I didn’t want to think my nana had possibly found that same secret truth.
I stood in the dark parlor until the world turned to Halloween at midnight, counting, Seven hundred eight–alligator, seven hundred nine–Missisippi…, my hand hovering between me and the book so long my shoulder ached. My hand extended like my papadaddy’s rotting hand had been extended. My fingers dyed orange from food coloring; the orange looked dark red in the shadows.
I counted that way, not touching the truth until something broke the spell. My nana coughed. The comforting, terrible sound came from her bedroom, the proof of life and death, coughs overlapping coughs, so fast I stopped counting. I left the book and went back to bed.
Gentle Tweeter,
The only thing that makes autumn a tragedy is our expectation that summer ought to last forever. Summer is summer. Autumn is autumn. Neither do grandmothers last an eternity. On Halloween my Nana Minnie had laid open my suitcases on the bed in my room, and she spent the day packing. The next day, November, a car would collect me for the drive to Boston, for the jet to New York, for the jet to Cairo, for the jet to Tokyo, for the rest of my life. While packing my clothes, it occurred to me that I lived a perpetual journey home, from Mazatlán to Madrid to Miami, but I never arrived.
While she ironed and folded underwear, my nana recited, “When your mama was your age, she used to pick her nose and wipe it under the chairs.” Reciting, “She bit her own toenails.” Reciting, “Your mama wrote in books….”
That summer in tedious upstate had been the longest stretch of time I’d lingered in one place. In a way I’d gone back in time, had lived my mother’s childhood. I could see why my mom had rushed off in such a frantic hurry, out to the world, to meet everyone and proceed to do everything wrong.
I hovered around my half-filled luggage and asked, “She wrote in what?”
As my nana plucked my freshly laundered items from the clothesline, she repeated, “Your mama used to write in books.”
The Pencil and the Blue Pen. The ferns and thyme and rose petals.
I did not, Gentle Tweeter, inquire about the ultimate fate of my ejaculate-spoiled chambray shirt.
Patterson says to start collecting flowers….
Leonard wants me to pick some flowers….
These had all been my mother’s and my nana’s thoughts when they had been my age. I studied my nana as intently as I’d study my own reflection in a mirror. For there was my nose, my future nose. Hers were my thighs. How her shoulders stooped forward when she walked was how I’d someday walk. Even her cough, ragged and constant, would likely be part of my inheritance. The liver spots on her hands I’d someday find on my own. It looked like such an impossible task: growing old. It scared me how I’d ever manage to achieve all those wrinkles.
My nana never asked about her missing tea jar. She didn’t seem to notice me always wearing my second-best eyeglasses. And in turn I went from not eating anything to scarfing down everything. In Toulouse, cooks say the first crepe is always “pour le chat.” For the cat. The first crepe is always flawed, scorched, or torn, so they let the cat eat it. Somehow I decided that I could do the same with my nana’s flaws. The more she cooked and baked, the more I ate. I could absolve her sins by eating them. And, if not forgive them, I could carry them around my hips as my own burden.
With every bite I swallowed my fear and grew older. And fatter. In every mouthful I choked down my bilious guilt.
The Beagle book had taught me about turtle eggs, but the Bible book taught me about Jesus Christ, and Jesus seemed like the greatest ally I could ever gain in the battle against my do-gooder parents. What a summer this had been. I’d gotten plump… chunky… just awful, in fact. And I’d begun to love reading. And I’d killed a man. I’d killed my grandfather. And I’d learned discretion.
Yes, I might’ve been eleven years old and a secret grandpa killer, an upstate-hating, passive-aggressive snob, but I learned what discretion meant. That summer I learned discretion and reserve and patience: qualities my former-hippie, former-punk, former-everything parents would never acquire.
On Halloween day, I didn’t speak up when I spied my nana sneaking on tiptoe. I was pretending to take a nap on the parlor sofa when she crept to the bookshelf, and from the wall of books she untucked one I’d never noticed. Hiding the book in the folds of her apron, Nana Minnie carried it back to where she was packing my luggage.
Exhibiting enormous willpower, I did not eat the basket of orange-colored popcorn balls we’d prepared for the night’s trick-or-treaters.