Hap and Hazard and the End of the World

by Diane DeSanders

  Granny says she’s the only person in the world with the name Jeffee. She says she was her daddy’s favorite. She tells stories and sings old school yard songs in her deep, trembly voice, even with just me spending the night with her, which is a lot, because when Papaw goes out of town, Granny can’t stand being alone, so I often spend the night, because the babies are too little to talk to. So I am Granny’s favorite because I’m the eldest. She told me that. But Granny teases.

  Granny says she had a Scots-Irish uncle named Peter Berry Campbell, who was hanged as a horse thief in Itasca, Texas. Her sister Aunt Annie says that’s not really true.

  Granny says they were so poor as children in Fort Worth, after their dad was killed on the railroad tracks, that they had no shoes and stole from the apple wagon for food. Another sister, Aunt Lee, says Granny just likes to make it a good story.

  Granny says her cousin was a vaudeville star in New York City, another sister, Kate, a world-champion boxer’s girlfriend, and that she herself was the It Girl at the speakeasies there.

  Granny says Seabiscuit whispered a secret in her ear, and maybe one day she’ll tell it to me. Granny likes the horses.

  Granny says it was terrible what they did to Al Smith. I see Mama and Aunt Meg rolling their eyes.

  Granny says she is secretly a witch with magic powers and can make people do whatever she wants. She winks at me.

  “Mostly Papaw,” she says, and Papaw laughs redly, his big Ho-ho-ho-ho Santa Claus laugh, and wetly, coughing, snorting, dabbing his eyes and nose and the corners of his mouth with his damp handkerchief, and soon all the friends and guests are laughing and teasing, too. With Granny, you’re always having a good time. At least you’re always having some sort of a time.

  In a little while, Nona and Cleveland are cleaning up coffee cups, glasses, ashtrays, and the friends are leaving, saying, “Merry Christmas,” saying “Now you can have your little Christmas,” and “Good-bye, honey,” “Good-bye, darling,” “Good-bye, sweetie pie.”

  I’m still walking around looking for Oliver. Baby Annie follows me out to the side porch where Granny plays game after game of solitaire on quiet days. Her bright little face looks up at me, wanting to play, but I tell her to go away.

  Then I’m sorry I did that, because she runs to Daddy, and he picks her up and cheers her up. I wish Daddy would cheer me up. Daddy likes Annie better than me, as well. It seems that everybody likes Annie best. It seems that there’s nobody for me. I think Oliver must be upstairs.

  There’s a fireplace with a tall black mouth where coals smolder, though windows are open now. I examine it, wondering how Santa could have squeezed down that chimney. I want to ask Daddy what he thinks of that, but I don’t see him now.

  The mantel is draped with cedar branches, silver fairy-reindeer stuck in here and there, and it’s hung with thick white cotton nurses’ stockings, lumpy with oranges, pinecones, walnuts, and drooping to the hearthstone floor. Next to it, Granny’s tree has white soapsuds along the branches, like snow, and is decorated silver and blue, different from our tree. Above the mantel is a painting of people around a table in old-fashioned clothes, all looking sideways at one another. A woman holds a fan. I always look at this painting. Something seems to be missing from it.

  The people all seem to want something, but they can’t say what.

  Now we have Christmas all over again, and beautifully, with Neiman-Marcus boxes and wrappings, new clothes and dolls and eggnog, brunch in the dining room with pancakes, strawberries, spicy sausages, and scrambled eggs.

  Daddy comes and sits across from me, and I’m hoping nothing will make him get upset, turn red, jump up, go clump-CLUMPing right out of the house. But now he sits sloppily in his chair, laughing like everything’s so ridiculous. He puts a Santa’s elf clown hat on his head. His elbow slips off the table spilling his drink, but Cleveland’s right there to nod, bow, smile, and quickly clean it up. I see Johnnie passing rolls with a mean smirk on her face.

  I see Mama talking to Aunt Meg and Nana, all looking at Daddy. Nana looks disgusted. Mama looks hurt, about to cry.

  GranDad rushes over and snaps a picture of Daddy, and then another of the women looking like that, and Nana gets mad at him. He’s always doing that—taking pictures at the wrong time.

  Aunt Meg comes and sits next to Daddy, gives him a cup of coffee Nona brought, jokes with him in her knowing, chipper way. She winks at me.

  Granny and Nana go back to talking about Granny’s blue glass swooping birds sitting around the dining room with beady eyes. Granny told me once they came from a faraway city where people drive boats through streets made of water. I asked Daddy once if this is true, and he said, “Yes, actually it is.”

  Granny’s telling Nana about the low-hung chandelier Granny says comes from “poor old Dresden,” which is another faraway city that Granny might have made up. It has cherubs and flowers all over, and little glass fruit and flower baskets that dangle and vibrate as if about to fall.

  When plates are being served, Oliver suddenly appears in the dining room and says it looks to him as if one of those baskets will fall right onto his plate, and when he says it, he looks right at me. Our eyes meet with the joke. And then everybody except Granny laughs, and I cannot stop laughing. I laugh so hard, I start choking, and Aunt Annie starts hitting me on the back.

  He must have been upstairs all this time. I see how he’s growing up beautiful, with soft brown eyes, always thinking of something funny, smiling to himself, staying on the edges of things, so I think that we are alike and should be friends, but he won’t show that. When I try to catch his eye, he will not look at me. But he and I have a secret from last summer, a thing we never talk about, a thing no one else knows.

  Papaw’s still laughing, so I pipe up and say, “Papaw laughs just like Santa Claus,” and then everybody laughs again, except for Daddy, who is now devouring a plate of food, and except for Oliver, who won’t look at me.

  After lunch, I try to get him to play. I dance around and hum a little song, thinking he’ll be forced to glance over, but he looks away quickly when I turn around, then acts as if he thinks I don’t see that, or as if this is telling me something I’m supposed to already know. I call him “Uncle Oliver,” and I see a corner of a smile. So this must be a little game of his.

  I dance closer and bump up against him. He glares down as if he really does not like me at all, not even the littlest bit. But Oliver has no reason not to like me. He’s supposed to be like a brother to me. Everybody says that.

  I know he does like me and is trying to hide it, because of last summer, when I was spending the night here.

  Sometimes I can tease a little light into those distant eyes. It’s the same light that comes into Daddy’s eye when he teases. I tease and tease toward that little light, trying to get him to laugh, or look, or play, or to do something, to do anything, to break the spell.

  I keep on dancing around the living room, the way the Girl can dance, like a tap dancer in the movies. Then baby Annie and cousin Dottie, who is her size, both come over and start dancing around, too, tripping, giggling, and everybody is clapping for them. They always have to do what I do. So I stop doing it.

  And then Papaw, Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho, wants me to come sit on his lap, and I can’t get out of it. I see Daddy clump-CLUMPing out of the room. Papaw gives me a piece of candy. GranDad snaps a picture of this. Why is he always doing that?

  Papaw holds me too close, pushes himself on me, bounces me around, keeps kissing me too wetly, so I pull loose, jump down, wipe off his slobbery kisses, and tap-dance away from him.

  Then Oliver goes up the stairs without saying a word to me or to anyone. I stand at the foot of the stairs and make a face at him as he goes up, sticking out my tongue.

  Granny comes out of the bar with a drink in her hand, sees me doing this, and says, “Stop that!”

  I stop, surprised to see her standing over me wild-eyed and pointing up at the sun-and-moon grandfather clock that stands looki
ng down from high above us on the stair landing. Oliver, just passing it, looks back at us, then disappears up the stairs.

  “Don’t you see that clock is about to strike?” she yells, loudly enough for the whole house to hear, as if we’re onstage. But they all keep talking. I just look at her.

  “Don’t you know if that clock strikes while you’re making a face like that, you could get stuck, and your face could stay that way, mean and ugly for the rest of your life?”

  “That clock?” I say.

  “Any clock!” she proclaims even more loudly.

  “But . . . is that really true?” I say, checking around, but Mama’s not looking over here.

  “Yes, of course that’s true,” says Granny, “Would I ever tell you something that wasn’t true?”

  She leads me back to the living room, where GranDad and Daddy are now taking everybody’s pictures next to the tree. Both of them have new cameras, which they examine and compare.

  Usually, GranDad takes pictures when something awkward is happening—he sneaks up and slyly snaps an argument or an accident, to everyone’s irritation, but now they are posing.

  Everybody puts on big smiles, their many voices chanting “Cheeeese” as we hear the clock striking. Bong . . . bong . . . bong . . . bong . . . bong . . . bong . . . Six o’clock.

  “WAS THAT A TRUE STORY?” I study Granny’s face as she tosses Grimm’s Fairy Tales onto a chaise and leans to kiss me good night, eager to get back downstairs. I am spending the night at Granny’s while Mama and Daddy go out to another party.

  “Well, nobody knows if it’s true or not. What do you think?”

  “Somebody must know.”

  “You think so?” Her black eyes crinkle.

  “Granny, are witches real?”

  “Sometimes I think so.” She smiles into the mirror.

  “Have you seen one?”

  “Maybe you’ve seen one and you don’t know it.” She winks, then leans in toward the mirror and freshens her makeup by holding the flattened red lipstick in one place and moving her wide, mobile lips back and forth and around over it.

  She brushes her wiry dark hair, dabs on more perfume, then winks at the mirror as if someone’s in there, and I see the two Grannies lean in and flirt with each other.

  She’s ready to get back for the few friends dropping by later for drinks, after the party you can hear getting louder downstairs, where they chatter and laugh about things that are not for children to know.

  The doorbell rings down there. After Mama and Daddy left for another party, at first I ran upstairs and knocked on Oliver’s closed door.

  “Get out of here, you brat!” he said, kicking it shut.

  Then we both went down to say good night to the company. They all smiled down, saying I looked “good enough to eat.”

  “What about ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’?”

  “Now I think that one might be true. I saw a giant about as big as a house one time at the fair.” She brushes off her shoulder, checks her dress. “Looked like he might come get me! I saw the Siamese twins, Cheng and Eng—two men stuck together for life!”

  “And what else?” I’ve heard this before, but the Siamese twins might be just one of Granny’s stories. My cousin Dan said that.

  “A man with only half a body and the sweetest face I ever saw! I saw the fat lady, too! Huge rolls of fat! I dropped my purse so I could look up under her dress! I love freaks!” she says, bugging her eyes, and blots her lipstick with a kiss on my forehead.

  “There! That’ll give you sweet dreams.”

  “But what about the witch? Is the witch part true?”

  “Time for you to be in bed, young lady.”

  “But is it true?” I want her to stay, but she closes the door.

  A Chinaman dresser lamp spotlights her makeup, powder puffs, perfume bottles, Jungle Gardenia and Chanel No. 5, the carved ivory elephants, each one smaller than the next. Then I try on Granny’s bracelets and beads.

  I crawl under her bed to find the True Crime magazines full of grainy pictures of famous criminals, famous detectives, Texas Rangers, people in handcuffs, guns and knives with tags, bullet holes, and half-naked bloody women and men lying in odd positions in small rooms, scary, sad, and dead.

  I think of Nona’s sister Johnnie, the way we found her asleep in a broom closet one time, after we’d walked around calling her name for an hour. Granny made it into a funny game. Whiskey smell poured out when Granny opened the closet door. Cleveland laughed, Johnnie moaned, cursed, woke up, pulled down her dress, gagging, but Nona’s face was plum purple, lips working, her angry eyes wet. Granny said to Nona, “That’s okay, honey,” and they all dragged drunken Johnnie out to Cleveland’s big black car.

  I tiptoe through the dark hall to look over the banister into the smoky pool of percolating piano music, laughing, singing and Ho-ho-hoing below. I’m the Girl who watches without being seen, observes the whole world from her lonely tower.

  I don’t see why I have to go to bed in the chilly upstairs like a baby and Oliver gets to stay up at the party, just because he’s older. I’m older than those babies! Just once, just once, why can’t I stay up and be at the party?

  On the landing just below and across from me, the grandfather clock strikes—Bong . . . bong . . . bong . . .—ten times, and the whole party stops, hearing it. The clock has a smiling sun face and a sideways moon face chasing each other around all day and night. Now the moon is at the top.

  I lean over farther and see Oliver sitting on the bottom steps down there, watching the party. I can see the top of his head, his knees, his Sunday shoes. He’s sitting alone watching, like I do. He has no one to talk to, no one to play with, like me.

  I wad a piece of paper from the desk and throw it down. It’s a direct hit! He looks up, his face open in surprise for an instant. I grin, wave, make a face. But he acts all huffy, goes off to tell on me. Maybe he’ll come up later.

  I SMELL THE LIQUOR AND CIGARETTES and feel the bumbling gestures, and instantly I know it’s Granny’s hands on me, her deep whiskey voice waking me. The house is quiet now.

  Papaw comes in, too, clearing his throat a few times, taking off suspenders, shoes, his pants. It’s late now. Papaw leans down to kiss me. I roll and jump off the bed, dodging him.

  “Oh, let her stay in here,” he says.

  “No,” I hear her say. “Not this one.”

  I heard Mama say, “Don’t you put her into bed with you!” before they left. She always says this, because Granny always does let me get into the big bed with her and Papaw, where there is lots of giggling and tickling.

  “Do not let her get into bed with you!”

  And Granny said, “Okay, Dear, okay.”

  Usually, when we hear them coming in, I jump down and run, run, run back to my guest-room bed. And Papaw gives his Ho-ho-ho Santa Claus laugh. And Mama says, “I hear that!” And Granny thinks this is terrifically funny. She likes to go against the rules, and be like a child. And I love this. But Mama does not like this one bit.

  Tonight, Papaw puts a little black hat on his head and goes into their big bathroom–dressing room, where he can be heard snorting, hawking, coughing, spitting, and then talking and chanting in a low voice behind the closed door in a strange other language, and he stays for a long time.

  Granny brings her drink and her cigarette and takes me back to the guest room, where she lies down on the bed next to me. I want to ask her more questions about Oliver, but what she wants to tell me is about how many friends Papaw has, how Papaw would be a much richer man today if he had not helped out so many people, how Papaw is the sweetest man in the world, and how most men are not sweet and not good—especially Daddy and GranDad and Uncle Ted, who are not good at all, but are terrible people, selfish, jealous, and mean—and even most especially Granny’s first husband, Homer, who was the meanest, coldest man you ever saw.

  She turns over and shakes me when I start to fall asleep to be sure I am hearing all of this, and I
wake up.

  “Is Oliver going to bed now, too?”

  “He’s already asleep,” she says.

  Then she starts talking about Oliver, how he was such a sweet baby when they adopted him, poor little thing, but now he’s changing, and she’d like to put “a brick on his head.” How Oliver talks to her so ugly now, how she hopes I’ll never talk ugly like that, how she’s getting old and will soon die.

  Will I be sorry when she dies? Will I promise to name one of my children after her? She’s starting to cry.

  I promise that I will, letting my eyelids fall.

  Then she says how Oliver was a tiny baby no one wanted, half Jewish and half not, and when the young parents died in a car wreck, neither family would take him. “Terrible people,” she says. But he was exactly what Granny and Pawpaw wanted. His real name was David. She says all this is a secret and not to tell.

  She tells me this whole thing every time I spend the night with her, and always late at night while I am falling asleep, waiting for a chance to ask about Oliver, and she gets drunker and drunker and more and more upset, maybe even after that on and on and on into the night.

  “What does Jewish mean?” I ask, opening my eyes.

  “Pawpaw’s a Jew,” she says.

  “But what is it?”

  “Don’t go to sleep yet; open your eyes.”

  “I’m just resting them,” I say, closing them again.

  I want to ask more about Oliver, but I start drifting off while she goes on with what a good man Papaw is, how he puts on his Jewish costume and reads his Torah every day and night, how he prays in secret away from all of us, in their big bathroom–dressing room, even though nobody makes him do it.

  As the night goes on, she tells how Papaw’s father escaped from the Tsar in a hay wagon, came to Texas, sold pots and pans out on the frontier, when there were still Comanche wars, then bought wild horses, bridle-broke them, sold them back in the city, then did this all again and again until he could send for his sweetheart back in Poland. They settled in Dallas, cofounded their Orthodox synagogue, had children, including Papaw, then almost had heart attacks when Granny and Papaw married, but she was not going to cook like that!