A Summer Story (Continued/Part 2)

The last I saw his face it was so twisted up with pain and grief, he covered it with his hands. The hands I had known all my life, the ones that tore into bread at dinner or thumbed through the newspaper in the morning, now seemed so blue- veined and weary, but obediently pressed into his eye sockets with despair.

That night grandpa proceeded to lock himself in his room, with intermittent audible bursts of sobbing and retching. I found myself alone. I went into the kitchen and turned off the oven, finding the potatoes only scooped half way into the serving bowl, the handle of the wooden spoon turned towards me. I grasped it as she did and just stood there for a while, my eyes welled.

I felt like a glass that’s foamed up and spilled over, and on impulse, I ate the mash viciously. Scoop after scoop of cold paste mushing in my mouth. It was a blind punishment, an act of gluttony, a distraction, having something she touched, articulated, planned with care apart of me.

In defeat, I flicked on the TV, the knob shifting into place with a satisfying thud, and put on the Lawrence Welk Show. I grasped the remote loosely, my wrist hanging limply off the couch, and rubbed the rubber buttons until they lifted from their sockets. I sat on the couch where she had been just hours before, the old corduroy couch gone thin, the physical manifestation of habit. I tried to convince myself that I could still feel some of her body heat in the cushions. My eyes focused just to the right of the television, only partially conscious of the song it sang to me with the crisp smiles and pancaked faces of yesteryear, they had pain in their eyes, too. I wrapped myself in blankets, like the gauze of a grieving mummy, and fell asleep in my tomb, waiting to be called in for dinner.

The streets no longer whorled by in a blur of boredom but something that I felt was gradually confronting me, a tangible jaw slowly closing in on my body without the beloved hands of my grandmother to protect me, shielding me from conjuring such thoughts in the first place.

I never really thought about death before then. I was never really been confronted with it. I knew of death, a concept that sounded about as bizarre as one day turning thirty. I had to learn from a young age that silences are where the real story lies, in the furrowed brows, cocked heads, and puffed out lips. The taboo that has been scrubbed into the minds of adults of what is pleasant and appropriate. I had not seen her since the womb and only really learned about her through these ques, through being a leper.  Because retired wasn’t an option for career day, that gray hair was not something generally synonymous with the nuclear family, a pitying look from a teacher gave me reason to roll my eyes and turn on my heel. Though this was never the story with the students. Because in highschool, for students to know about my mom would mean that they would have to give a damn about me, to pay attention if it were to come up in passing, to even construct an insult or a plan to hang me by my thumbs would be an utmost expression of love. Isolation has always been the most powerful form of alienation, and shame just seals the deal.

Yet, school does serve two purposes in this town, one being an outlet, for dried up pasty men to assert their bureaucracy, with the bold lines of structure and power. The kind of men who find the true thrill in writing a detention, or harvesting the dissatisfaction that grows in the walls of the school building. Which ultimately serves as a lubricant for the slippery yet somehow chafing masturbation later performed as some sort of primal soothing that only admits to themselves that they should have gotten out of their hometown when they had the chance. Before a potbelly made up of a third of their body, sprouting from years of yeasty beer as their drug of choice, and the free bread from countless americana restaurants that pride themselves on being “family-style”.

On the other hand, school serves as the thing given to kids to numb, to traffick, to blockade and inbreed. What else would sell the drugs or feed the armies, there has to be a pain to numb. The goofy glaze of an eye, the yellowed teeth capped with plaque, the ribbed torso, and stinking clothes are all attributes of the student body in a place with more dropouts than tourists. Every classroom feels divided, the students in a downed slump of hoodied imprisonment, a honeycomb of gaping mouths. The teacher's side, a ball of nervous energy, desperate to inspire or abuse, depending on the direction in which their grain was stroked that day. But there’s a million ways to blame the victims of this town, it’s easy to find fault in the ugly, I should know, I’m in highschool. There’s another million reasons to blame her for being one of them. It was hard to blame her at all, the only the only pictures I had seen of her she was a preteen, holding her baby cousin, her smile so big she was all teeth, the nubby, yellow-but-brushed teeth of a young adolescent. She looked down at the child, it was comforting seeing the top of my mother’s head, her hair parted, revealing a balmy pink scalp that I wish I could smell. But in this picture she looked more like a friend’s little sister, not someone that birthed me. Each picture I was given I would analyze like this, looking for the texture in her skin, the grain of her hair, the chipped fingernail polish, and innocence worn plainly on that of a little girl.

But I knew there was more. Whenever I had the chance to flip through file, turn every page, and tick every box I took it, and it wasn’t until I found an old manilla envelope under grandpa’s workbench, inside I found pictures showing a woman with tubes plugged in her body and up her nose, her arms as thin as the railing of the hospital bed seemed to swallow her. Thick pink scars marked the length of her exposed calf. She was gazing up at the person taking the picture, a look of being both off guard and utterly tired, . Her eyes looked massive in her sunken face, like that of a doe, looped with drain. But if I tilted the photo forward, she looked right at me, and in that moment I knew it was her.

    A couple weeks went on like that, two halves of a home divided into house. Some kind of melting pot of  bitten nails and bed sores, trying to stamp my heart onto paper, but always failing to hit the mark. It felt like the light outside never really changed from the indigo of either dawn nor twilight. Grandpa continued to lock himself up in his room. Sometimes I’d awake in the night and think I hear footsteps in the kitchen-- the jingle of a mason jar, the krinkle of a cracker sleeve, as if there was a shame in eating while grieving. Yet we both retreated so we could grow our moldy pity, nourishing the metastasizing scar tissue that throbbed a achey sort of blues against our ribs. Both hating each other for the person we both loved, the umbilical cord had snapped and it felt as if love no longer its way between us.