First days at Granny’s

A. Blinken…. This morning at 3:00 A.M., I lie eyes blinking in the darkness. My Honey has work today, but the shop is closed. It was almost too late to go to sleep; in a few hours I would fire up the pickup and run some groceries to Granny and Tally, and plow the road coming down. I thought of Tally, and how it must be different for her, living up there, and it made me remember my first days living with Granny. I was in junior high, and I hated it. Mother was in the depths of her alcoholism, dad was making a half-hearted effort to get custody of me, Mother had sworn that she’d rather work as a prostitute to pay lawyer fees than let him have me. I wanted both of them to burn endlessly in hell, her for being a bar slut and him for leaving me with her disease to find a younger, prettier non-alcoholic wife from a better family in a nicer town to make babies far more lovable than I. I was used to doing what I wanted. Mom was gone at work for nine hours, home for a whisky shot and a frozen TV dinner, a quick motherly admonishment to do my homework then to the bar for four or six hours. I could go out, but had to be home for awhile around ten; she always called me to make sure I was going to bed. She would be slurring, her voice thick, and I could always hear rough men laughing and talking and country music blaring, and I imagined the black payphone mouthpiece with a thousand anonymous specks of spit from Ps and Ts, and her breath on it, stinking of cigarettes, alcohol and lipstick. Other than those brief, ceremonial interruptions, my life was my own, and I was master of the house. Sometimes after ten o’clock check in I would leave, taking care to leave a lump under the covers, should she bring a new boyfriend home and think to peek in on me. I’d even bought a wig for two bucks from a girl at school and cut it to look like my own hair, to stick just above the covers. I would roam the village, and everyone who saw me thought I was a hoodlum, and it thrilled me to think they thought of me as criminal, even dangerous, but the truth is I was bored, lonely and curious. The town isn’t very big, but there is a lot going on. I saw people screwing in cars, watched through windows as men and women fought and screamed, watched girls and women undress or in their nightclothes. Mostly, though, I watched families, sitting together at a meal, or crowded on a sofa, watching television and snacking. Practically nobody has shades on their kitchen windows, but a lot of family life goes on in the kitchen. I couldn’t visit kitchen windows before dark, but that was fine, because I hated TV dinners, and I could visit the town’s two places that served food, and either find something nice in the swill can out back (don’t be squeamish, you have to dig around to find clean stuff) or have the cook give me something left over. I made sure I was always clean, always polite. I was sweet on a girl at school, and for a time I peeked at her for a couple hours a night, doing homework in the kitchen, sitting on the couch in her nightgown. One night she was sleeping on the sofa with her dad snoring and her mom watching the news. My love was slumped on one end of the sofa, and her nightgown had slid up exposing long soft legs and white cotton undies. I crept too close to the window, and her mom saw me and woke her dad who rushed out groggy and righteously belligerent and challenged me and I had to tell him my cat was missing, a big yellow cat, that I’d seen a cat like that in this neighborhood the day before. He got a flashlight and for awhile we called "kitty kitty" and he finally said it was too late for me to be out and he took me home just in time for the ten o’clock call. Sometimes I would find the Reagan brothers, Ryan and Dan, and their girls, and I’d climb into the back seat of the Camero, they would get me drunk or loaded on weed, to laugh at me, yeah, but still they were good company, and I liked being their monkey, I clowned for them, and they thought it was so damn cute when I hit on their girlfriends, but it was still exciting to me to touch those warm, living breasts, even for an instant. The Reagan brothers always saw me home safe; wasted, horny, tired, but safe. One night, though, Mother got beat up behind the bar, and the cops came to the house to tell me because it was after ten and I wasn’t there to answer the phone. They discovered I was gone, looked around for me and were back at the house again when the Reagan boys dropped me off. The cops made a stink, but the girls swore I was drunk when they found me walking along the road, and I had the wit to say, "these selfish pricks wouldn’t give a drink to their own mother, or that joint, either." In those days, in these hills, that was good enough for the cops. They tagged me and put me in a bed with a nice family, and the next day Granny came to town and bailed me out, and I moved up with her. The social worker explained that because I was young, they weren’t going to charge me, but that Mother was going to be in the hospital for a while, and I could live with Granny, unless there were any other trouble. Then, I would be before the judge, who would put me somewhere. To this very day I know that about judges, they put people somewhere. So, I go to bed that night on a sofa by a creaking wood stove, not the sofa Tally will be sleeping on, because by the second time I had gone to stay, Granny had gotten a sofa bed. The cabin has one large room that is the kitchen, living room and sleeping space for kids, a small bedroom, and a bathroom the door of which is inside the bedroom door, make a sharp right. At one time there were bunk beds on the wall in the large room. As the kids moved out Granny put in bookshelves, so it made more sense to have a sofa bed. But I slept on the old sofa, which was leather and which bitched and farted under me as I moved. I wondered if Mother were going to die, and wondered if I could still live in the house if she did. I wondered if my father, at long last, would get me and try to fit me in to his better family. But, nope, Mother didn’t die, and she even had enough control to prevent me from going to father, who didn’t struggle much, and Granny stepped forward and signed papers, so for two months I lived with Granny Wise. When I woke up the first morning, there was breakfast made, the first time that had happened since I was a little kid. Granny made me do dishes with her, I dried. She made me go out and work in the garden with her, I dug weeds. We ate lunch together, and we did dishes, I washed. In the afternoon we went to the big rock by the river and she meditated while I pretended to meditate, but mostly daydreamed about being so strong I could break steel or jump over cars and kill anyone, anyone at all, with one perfectly placed punch, until I fell asleep in the sun. Then, we went fishing in the lower creek, and caught three nice trout. That night after we did dishes (dried) we sat together on the sofa and watched television. There was only one channel, and it was snowy, but we ate fresh cinnamon fish, little triangles of flower, sugar, butter, cinnamon and vanilla cooked crisp and sprinkled with powdered sugar; in short, a snack. I wanted to run outside and look in the window to see myself with Granny. It was the same every day: in the morning we did the innumerable little chores it takes to grow the food, cut the wood, tend the stock, mend the buildings and so on and on. Whatever work there was, we did it together, and as we worked Granny would tell me stories about Greatgrandad Aaron Wise, my namesake, and the stories made me feel connected. Afternoon we would meditate and then I would do homework while Granny did other chores. Nothing else happened in my world, no food, no television, not even other chores, until my homework was done to Granny’s satisfaction. Once a week a teacher came up and tested me and gave us more assignments. My grades went up. I took a bath every night in Granny’s ancient zinc bathtub, and brushed my teeth with her twice a day. After sixty days, my life had rhythm, labor, rest, company. One night while we were watching snowy TV and playing Old Maid, the telephone rang. It was Mother: "I’m all better now, honey, I’m going home and I want you to come home, too. We’ll be a family again." I was dubious, but still young enough to believe it might be true. I told Granny I was going home, and she said, "oh." That was the first time I lived with Granny Wise. For Tally, it will be different; for one thing her Mom loves and cares about her, they’re just not communicating well right now. Tally’s older, more mature, and for that matter bigger than I was back then. She has something to look forward to, a baby and her own turn at motherhood, her own chance to become a bar-hopping slut, or watch TV and eat snacks. Granny is a lot older; Tally will be doing some heavy work, hauling wood and shoveling snow. Still, even if she might not know it, these are rich days, filled with order and mischief, Granny days. She’ll remember them all her life. This I thought back at 3:00, and now, at 7:00 I’m chugging up through the snow to see them. I’m bringing food and some pregnancy tea and omega 3 fish oils for Tally and a bottle of peach brandy for Granny. I bought cinnamon, maybe we’ll make cookies, maybe we’ll play some cards. Maybe Granny will tell us stories of Greatgrandad. Thinking of Greatgrandad Aaron, I realize, for all I know about him, I don’t know where he’s buried, it’s never come up. The snow is thick in the canyon, and wads bind my wipers, I can hardly tell where the edge of the road lies under the whiteness; I don’t want to end in the creek. Maybe I’ll wait until the storm is over to go down; maybe I’ll have to stay the night. We’ll watch snowy TV.