by Matt Sumell
Also unremarkable were the rest of the cases I heard that day, including my own. The police officer’s testimony was an awful bore, just facts, and after he was through I was offered the opportunity to say a few words in my defense. I said only one, quietly, and to my shoes: “Sorry.” The apology was met with silence, and when I finally had the courage to look up at the judge, he was blinking at me. Then he blinked at my father, who was standing beside me, and asked him if he’d like to say a few words on my behalf. Neither of us had expected this, and it was cause for alarm. My father has never been good with words—sometimes he isn’t even decent with them. It’s not uncommon for my father, when asked what he’d like, to struggle so violently with formulating a response that he fidgets and his eyebrows move around weirdly, eventually becoming so flustered that he bites down on his tongue and turns a little red before, finally, to everyone’s terrific relief, he manages to order the cheeseburger.
But somehow, without the slightest hesitation or twitch at all my father looked at the judge and said, “Yeah your honor—uhhhhhh, I dunno … he’s a kid, he took a hairy, you know? He’s … gets good grades.”
I watched the judge watch my father, and I could tell that he was somewhat confounded by what this man had just said to him. Then he shook his head, suspended my license, sentenced me to five hundred hours of community service, gaveled his gavel, and recommended I seek out a therapist.
“It’s perfectly normal,” my mother said later that night as she wiped the dinner table with a dirty blue dish sponge. “Everyone needs help sometimes.” But I refused therapy, and would continue to until a few years after she died, when a different judge in a different state didn’t give me the option.
* * *
I woke up around eight thirty the next morning, and even though we were running late my mother took me to the Oakdale Deli, bought me a BLT and a soda for lunch, a coffee for right then. I was nervous about being late, but when we got there a note was scotch-taped to the office door.
Al,
Mow.
—Jim
I mowed. Around noon I got hungry, and I sat on that bench by that pond and watched the ducks and geese and swans again, then figured I’d cut them a break and broke off the corners of my sandwich. They raced to eat what little there was, and I spoke words of encouragement to the less aggressive ones, made a game of trying to get them their share until a swan swam over and chased them away. I gave it the finger, then walked back to the mower and continued staining my sneakers green.
The next day I saw the same note on Jim’s door, did the same thing. I saw the same note all week, did the same thing all week, except I started buying an extra roll for twenty-five cents to feed the ducks and geese, and made a game of not feeding the swans. Soon enough I was buying two rolls. Then I got a new note.
A—
Keep mowing.
—J.
I kept mowing, kept watching the boats on the river, kept feeding the fowl at lunch, was at my bench with a sandwich when I heard quacking and honking, wings moving. I looked up and watched some mallards half-fly, half-run on top of the water and splash back down. Their webbed-feet footprints rippled out in concentric circles on the surface of the pond, and I followed them back to where they started, where I saw one duck bobbing back and forth with no head. Like, its head was missing. I stood up at the water’s edge to see if I wasn’t seeing it correctly, but I was—its head was gone. I walked around the pond to get a closer look, then returned to my bench and fed the ducks and geese and even the swans.
A few days later Jim pulled up in his truck, beeped the horn, and asked me how it was going.
“Good,” I said. “Where you been?”
“My office,” he said.
“Right,” I said. “Got it.” Then I told him about the headless duck. He stared at my nose for a second, then smiled, said it was probably an alligator snapping turtle.
“They’re like dinosaurs, these things. They get big—up to a hundred pounds big—and they sit there, half buried in the mud, with their mouths open. There’s this little lure thing that hangs off their tongues, and if anything gets close to it, like, for example, a feeding duck with its little duck ass in the air, it’ll bite its head clean off and—bloop—up floats the duck.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s something.”
“No it isn’t,” he said, easing off the brake, slowly pulling away.
EAT THE MILK
For my brother’s twenty-fourth birthday I bought him a little plastic horsey doll that came with a little plastic orange comb so you could little-plastic-orange-comb its mane and tail and shiny coat, but before I could mail it to him my grandmother peeled the medicinal transdermal patch off her body and ate it. It put her in the emergency room followed by six weeks’ recovery in Bay Shore’s Petite Fleur Nursing Home, so I arranged for some time off from the marina I was working at and drove the ten hours north to my parents’ house, but my mother forgot to leave the key under the rock in the garden, which was never really a garden as much as it was a rock and a frog in a top hat lawn ornament hanging out in some weeds. Across the way, on the other side of the cement path that curved between the driveway and the back door, near a bush that had somehow survived decades of laundry water that shot out of a yellowing PVC pipe sticking out of a half-buried basement window, was a small, grayed square of warped plywood with a broken red brick on top of it. Underneath that were some earthworms and pill bugs and a stubbed-out cigarette filter.
I walked a counterclockwise lap around the outside of the house and found a Styrofoam cooler on the porch with no key in it, and a dirty white sock in the bushes near the driveway with no key in it, and the key was not in the barbeque either, or the mailbox or newspaper box, or the bird feeder hanging cracked and crooked from the white-and-brown branch of the dying birch slanting outside the hall window. The key was also not in the gutter on the southwest corner of the house stopped up with at least five falls’ worth of oak leaves and pine needles, or under the potted daisy outside the garage. I lit a cigarette, covered my left eye with my left hand, and called my mother a dick. Then I busted out a screen and clambered through the open kitchen window.
My belt buckle was a problem for me, and in trying to work it over the window ledge I bumped a ceramic figurine of a little boy with abnormally large eyes holding a MOMMIES ARE #1 sign that I’d bought for her at the Idle Hour Elementary School fair in the fourth or fifth grade, and its head broke off when it hit the counter. Sparkles came bounding into the room and, when I was finally inside and upright, I squatted down to pet her. She hopped up on her hind legs to lick my face, then pushed off and spun and pointed her asshole at me. When I hesitated a second, she eye-contacted me over her shoulder like C’mon already, so I pet and scratched around her asshole, saying, “Hi, girl, OK, girl, OK…” until her back legs buckled and the right one started flailing around involuntarily, her toenails tapping the tile in a bell curve of sound—slow, fast, slow.
I stood and got her a doggie treat out of the drawer, which I think she swallowed whole, then she stayed staring up at me, hoping for another.
“Sparkles,” I said, “I love you, but I can’t give you any more snacks. You’re too fuckin’ fat. Keep it up and you’re gonna get diabetes, dude, and then your life will be fuckin’ snackless, and what kind of life is a snackless life? Next thing you know they’re amputating your legs off, and then you’re a baby walrus for real, only you suck at swimming and would probly drown in your own water bowl. Probly have to strap you to a skateboard with bungee cords and drag your fat self to the vet. Dude’ll take one look and be like, ‘Guess she has a gland problem?’ And I’ll be like, ‘No, a snack problem.’ And he’ll be like, ‘Oh, well how about this snack?’ And you know what that snack is, Sparkles? A syringeful of poison. Then you’re fuckin’ dead, dude. Forever. There’s no snacks when you’re dead. So do us both a favor—scram.”
After a short standoff, she licked my pant leg.
So I gave
her another treat because I’m a sucker for dogs, and when she finished with that one she tried for a third, and I gave her a third because I’m a sucker for dogs multiple times. I almost gave her a fourth, but instead I blew smoke in her face and she blinked and twitched and turned and sauntered away, every now and again casting glances back at me over her shoulder until she was under the table, where she lay down and closed her eyes to dream of food in black-and-white. I put the cigarette out in the sink and opened another window.
On the kitchen table was a note from my mother that hoped my drive was good and if I was hungry there were cold cuts in the fridge and don’t smoke in the house and she saw Gloria Estefan at Jones Beach last weekend and it was a great show. She would be home from work around five and she couldn’t wait to see me and the doctors found cancer in Grandma’s kidney, don’t worry, XOXO. I lit another cigarette. It was 3:32.
By 4:16 I had eaten all the cold cuts and bacon and some pizza bagels and pierogies and a strawberry fruit-at-the-bottom yogurt and felt a little sick, so I lay down on the couch in the den and turned on the TV to a show about a lady judge whose veins popped out of her forehead while she yelled. I watched thinking she wouldn’t be so mean if there wasn’t a big black bailiff standing there with a gun and a club protecting her—three minutes of that and I was overcome with restlessness. Somewhere along the way I’d become incapable of relaxing, of allowing my body to be still, of rest. It isn’t that I have more energy than I know what to do with, because I don’t. It’s that my body is uncomfortable. It’s not pain, necessarily, but an antsy annoyance of the muscles and—when still—I become excruciatingly aware of just how uncomfortable I am. Then I have to move. I get up and pace around, shake my hand like I just touched something too hot, fidget, tap a table or countertop. I take long walks.
In a car, though, I’m stuck, and the entire drive up from Wilmington had been a nonstop series of seat adjustments and shoulder rolls, opening and closing windows, switching CDs and tinkering with the volume knob, rubbing my eyeballs and punching myself in the legs, as if hurting the leg hurts the ache that’s in it. I smoked a lot of cigarettes, cracked my knuckles, my ankles, my back and my neck, cracked everything that was crackable and bobbed my head in order to make a smashed bug on the windshield appear to fly just above the treetops bordering the interstate, until I banged my chin on the steering wheel while attempting to clear a particularly tall pine outside of Richmond. When that got old, I looked for things to look at: the rearview, the rearview, trees, a dead dog next to a blue hospital sign and GOD BLESS OUR SOLDIERS BEEFY BURRITO $1.39, the rearview—anything but the road itself. I’ve been in over a dozen accidents, all of which were my fault. I hit a bridge once. I drove through a closed garage door. It’s stopping I have a problem with.
I got up from the couch, wrote a note on the back of my mother’s note, took the horsey doll, and headed off to see my grandmother.
* * *
The nursing home parking lot was filled with cars that looked alike, except for a running ambulance with two EMTs leaning on it. I smiled at my shoes as I passed them, walked around to the front, where three women in wheelchairs were feeding gray-purple pigeons, and felt a little guilty when I heard their squeaky wings and realized I’d scared them off. I apologized to the woman closest to me, who had eyes like two copper coins floating in fog.
As I made my way down a long hallway I passed the activities board, and the week was jam-packed with Balloon Tennis and Music-and-Motion and Let’s Make Oriental Fans, Pet Visits and Grandma’s Handbag and Elizabeth Rafter turns 101 years old!!! At the reception desk a book lay open with four columns—Name, Date, Time, Visiting—and behind it a white nurse in pink scrubs sat not smiling with a half-eaten sandwich in front of her. I said hello and asked her if it was a turkey sandwich.
“Ham,” she said.
I didn’t believe her. Then I asked her if she could tell me where my grandmother was and she asked me if I could spell my grandmother’s last name. I could and did, and she looked it up on her computer—typey typey typey, return—told me her room was B10 but that she might be in the dining hall, then took half of the half of sandwich in one bite.
B2, B4, B6, B8—I thought of Battleship, my favorite childhood game. My brother liked Connect Four and used to lick the leftover Italian dressing off his salad plate. My grandmother wasn’t in her room, but her roommate was, in bed, her body bent and twisted with MS or some other awful thing, her mouth open to the cracks in the ceiling. I said hello and she said nothing at all, and above her bed hung a painting of Jesus Christ floating up to heaven, topless and staring directly into the camera, his arms spread wide like, Behold, cameraman … I’m flying! Another possibility, it seemed to me, was that he was fleeing, and I imagined knocking him out of the sky with a rock.
Nailed to the wall above my grandmother’s bed was a small wooden crucifix and pictures of my dead grandfather and their children and their children’s children—the same picture that hung in our hallway of my brother, sister, and me naked in a bathtub together, which probly saved time but doesn’t seem like any way to get clean. I said goodbye to my grandmother’s roommate, then waved bye at her, then felt dumb about it and walked out.
Wandering around the hallways I overheard an old man report to a nurse that another man “killed me on the back of the leg six days ago,” and a woman using a dirty-tennis-balled walker was staring into a fish tank to apply light red lipstick. I stopped at the front desk again, and the now sandwichless nurse pointed me toward the dining hall, a large room with six or seven long tables in it. It was full but quiet except for the TV and a lady rocking violently hollering for someone-or-thing named Mashtar, and as I looked from face to face it occurred to me that women make the mistake of living too long more than men do.
My grandmother was seated at the table farthest from the window, pinching her paper bib and staring at the wall. I walked over and put a smile on my face so fake it trembled. She had a see-through mustache and the hairs were longer at the corners of her mouth. I kissed her forehead.
“What’s up, Grams, heard you ate your medicine patch.”
“Sydney?”
“No … I’m your daughter’s son. Alby.”
Something inside her shifted, she shook, and her eyes wandered off, following butterflies or parakeets or the word pajamas ticker-taping across her eyeballs, a monkey riding a dog or pink fighter jets on their way to kill kill kill. Or more likely they were following nothing at all, which at that moment was somewhere on the white wall between the clock and the television advertising deodorant. Smell cool.
Her eyes went wide. “Everything’s getting weird.”
“It’s always been weird. Here’s a horsey doll.”
I took her shaking, spotted hand and tried to put the doll in it, but she wouldn’t take it, so I placed it on the table in front of her.
“Don’t eat the comb,” I said.
She reached out and knocked the horsey doll over, then recoiled her shaking hand in a way that reminded me of a vacuum cleaner cord retracting.
“It’s OK,” I said. “It’s just a toy.”
She looked off, and after a while I waved my hand in front of her face. “Grandma,” I said, snapping my fingers now. “Hello? Yoo-hoo.”
She looked at me and flashed her gums in what I think was a smile.
“The pope came,” she said.
“On a kid’s back?”
I half-regretted it almost immediately, because who am I to insult something that gave her comfort? I’m all for painkillers, just prefer mine in pill form. Pints and rocks glasses. Ladies.
“He said … everybody should speak English…”
“Don’t popes speak Latin,” I said, “and like, refer to themselves in the first person plural? We am the Harriet Tubman of pedophiles. Did We explain We’s hostility toward women, gaylords, and science? How about common-sense issues like condoms as a way of preventing AIDS and, you know, not allowing priests to rape children’s butt
holes and mouths? Did We say anything about that, Grandma? Because I think that We—never mind.”
I half-regretted that almost immediately, too, but before I could apologize she started singing a song in Italian or Nonsense, I couldn’t tell the difference, just sat there listening to her until the antsy feeling I get settled somewhere in my chest and I felt like moving again. I stood up to leave, but something about the smallness of her voice—the pitch, my inability to understand her, the helplessness of it—made me feel lonely for her. So I resolved to stay at least until my mother showed up, and I sat back down as four nurses in pink scrubs wheeled in four carts stacked with orange trays of food. It wasn’t long before my grandmother stopped singing, and then we just sat there quietly, she staring at her special spot on the wall, me at the TV, watching the end of a commercial where a young girl on a beach goes, “I need a brownie…” and then all her friends chime in with, “Oh yeah, she’s menstrual!” and laugh.
Eventually a tray was placed on the table in front of us, on it a dish of pureed meat and what I think was pureed rice, a bowl of something orange, red Jell-O, a glass of thickened water, a glass of thickened milk, and a cup of thickened tea.
“Will you be feeding her today?” asked the nurse.
“I’d rather not,” I said, and she gave me this look, so I said, “I’d better not,” and she gave me the same look as before, in fact I don’t think she ever changed it, so I said I’d try.
I started with the meat because it was the most brown, which seemed important. I took a heaping spoonful, asked, “Ready?” and as my grandmother said yes I stuck it in. She coughed and spit up on her chin. “Wup,” I said, and wiped it off with the bib.
I’m sure at one point it looked as if I was trying to feed her left cheek. At another, her nostrils. I flicked tea off her shoulder. But soon enough we found our rhythm, Grandma and me, and we settled into it. I’d scoop a heaping spoonful of something, hold it up in front of her so she could see it, then announce what I thought it was. “Rice,” I’d say. “I think this is rice.” Then I’d slowly bring it to her lips and wait until she parted them. I’d slide the spoon and its contents in and tip it up until she’d close her mouth around it. Then I’d draw the spoon out and watch her jaw as she swished the stuff around before swallowing. It was strangely satisfying, our method. It meant there was an understanding. Sometimes I think all I ever want is an understanding.